reduce that amount to some extent. we have military bases in many countries. the real money are the promises we have made to future generations in medicare, medicaid, social security. it has been a cruel hoax from many people. singing they cannot meet the pension obligations that they promised people -- saying they cannot meet the pension obligations that they promise people -- we need to reform this. we have to update these changes for the 20% century. medicare was -- 21st century. medicare was a gold standard for 1965. it has not changed much since the prescription drug benefit. we need to figure out which health outcomes can be altered for the better. we do not need to abolish these

programs, but make them relevant for future generations. there is not a single part of the private sector that has stayed the same from 1965. we need to learn from the knowledge from the private sector and apply it to the public sector. host: to use support paul reince plan for medicare and medicaid? plan for medicare and medicaid? guest: i do not support every part of it. many medicare patients can go out and shop from many different plans. politically, we are not one to change this plan for anyone under the age of 55. we will give them all kinds of options. it can be a better plan, because

it can bring the forces of competition to play. in the federal government, we say we should give people the same kind of health benefits the federal government has. they have a range of choices. we should give the same range of choices to medicare patients, so they can buy plants that are better suited to their circumstances. host: there is an opinion piece in your paper, the wall street journal, called reverse robin hood. what is your reaction? guest: price controls -- ny

>> guest: over half the physicians won't see medicaid patients. will see medicaid patients. the status quo is unsustainable. the basis of what paul ryan has proposed was endorsed by a bipartisan commission set up by bill clinton. it had a couple of democratic senators on it. since then, the budget director has endorsed the basic concept behind the ryan plan. there is a support on this because of the partisanship. we have to change something about medicare to update it for the future. supporting the status quo and taking pot shots at anything that is presented as an alternative is not responsible. what is your alternative other than price controls? i have lived in countries with nationalized health insurance.

rationing is not good for old people. you wait nine months for a hip replacement treatment. you wait nine months for procedures. some people die because they are waiting to long. that is a scene in canada. the wait list -- seen in canada. the way this is so long that people died waiting on it. host: we will look at the bipartisan deficit commission and aspects of its leader. today we will look at medicare and medicaid. each day we are looking at different things. wednesday will be defense and security spending. thursday, overhauling the tax policy. friday, a look at social security and what the bipartisan commission proposed on that. michigan, a democrat line. host: i want to thank c-span.

i want to make a request before a comment. would you in the future do something on all of these think tanks that are across the united states that are preparing this extremist, right rwing >> just a couple of moments left many this segment, you can see it in its entirety at c-span.org. we are going live to the center for american progress for a discussion on u.s. military strategy in afghanistan. two panels will look, first, at counterinsurgency and then options to negotiate peace in afghanistan. this is expected to last until about 3 this afternoon. >> i'm rudy deleon, senior vice president here at the center for american progress. this is the first of two panels that we're going to be doing on afghanistan today, and it's part of a series.

it's april 2011, we're coming up on the ten-year mark of this fall in afghanistan, and so i think it's a time both to focus on current activities in the theater, but also to start asking questions in terms of the lessons learned. the ten-year milestone of combat activities is a bit unique in terms of the armed forces of the united states in terms of time and length. and so we have with our program here today, part one will look at counterinsurgency and some of the lessons learned on the security side. and then panel number two, which will be chaired and moderated by our colleague at the center, dr. larry korb and jeff lawyer rememberty of the century foundation, they'll be talking on their recent study that included tom pickering, other senior diplomats of which larry was one of the members of the

panel. they'll be looking at the prospects for dialogue and negotiation. so if you will, talking, fighting or somewhere in between seemed to be the two segments that we're going to be discussing today. now, in terms of this panel we've got two very distinguished participants, and we're going to sort of get them going, and i don't think i'll have to be a referee too much of the time. but i think that there are clear opinions and strong arguments on both sides. but i think our focus today is not necessarily to relive the past, but instead to understand the lessons for the future. so, first, our guest dr. john nagl, is the president of the center for a new american security. he's also a member of the defense policy board where we both serve, also served on the

congressional commission to look at the quadrennial defense review where we both, both worked together. a graduate of west point, he's written books, he's been on a lot of very impressive academic groups in his career. a teacher also. and has been an adviser to some of our current military leaders in the field. so, john nagl, welcome to the center for american progress. >> pleasure to be here, rudy. >> and, of course, my other colleague here at the center, brian katulis, our senior fellow with a focus, really, on u.s. national security in the middle east and south asia. brian has served as a consultant to numerous u.s. government agencies, private entities, nongovernmental organizations, projects in more than two dozen countries including iraq, pakistan, afghanistan, yemen,

egypt and colombia. from 1995 to 1998, he lived and worked in the west bank and on the gaza strip, in egypt for the national democratic institute for international affairs. he has a master's degree from princeton's woodrow wilson school of public and international affairs and a ba in history and arab studies from villanova. so thank you, brian, for being engaged here. two very capable men, two regional experts. and so what i'm going to do is just to start this program by asking each of them to offer a general assessment on the status of current activities in afghanistan. john? >> thanks, rudy. great to be here. i would, i would take minor exception to one thing you said, if i can. i would not bill myself as a

regional expert but a long-time student of counterinsurgency with an interest in afghanistan. but i make no claims to be an expert on that country. i've been watching and working on afghanistan for a number of year now but not a regional expert. that said, the principles of counterinsurgency are being applied in afghanistan, i think, to a pretty high degree. my general assessment of the situation is that we are seeing a fragile but reversible gains, but i think clear gains. what i'd like to do, if i can, is run down the operation and the counterinsurgency campaign and just make a quick assessment against each of those. these came from an article written by major general pete chiarelli, we've used his analysis, stole shamelessly from it as we were writing the

army/marine corps counterinsurgency field manual, and general chiarelli came up with six lines of operation. combat with operations and civil security operations, building host nation security forces, providing essential services to the population -- giving them good governance -- promoting economic development. all of that wrapped up in a comprehensive operations campaign. those are the six lines that a counterinsurgency force tries to follow as it conducts one of these campaigns. just making a quick assessment against eachover those. combat operations and civil security operations we're showing fairly remarkable progress, i would say. the classic, clear/hold/build counterinsurgency strategy is working well where we have sufficient forces on the ground, and really sort of the broad overview of my argument is that we didn't really start a counterinsurgency campaign in afghanistan until 2009. it was very much an economy of force effort. we took our eyes off that ball

really as early as late 2002 and didn't refocus on afghanistan and give it the resources it needed until 2009. so the campaign, in a lot of ways, really started at that point, and we've -- we're able to put forces on the ground we are able to conduct effective civil security operations. similarly, nation security forces, dramatic progress. really since lieutenant general bill caldwell took charge of that effort in november 2009, and we've seen a dramatic increase in the quantity, but also increasingly in the capability of afghan security forces, and that's incredibly important. ultimately, we are going to hand off responsibility to an afghan government and to afghan security forces, so we have to have something to hand off to. i think we've made real progress there. those are the only two lines that are military lines. the other four are not primary military responsibilities and,

frankly, they haven't been as successful. we are still providing fairly limited essential service to the population, security being the most essential service. but access to the necessities of life is still very much a problem for the afghans. their governance is improving very slowly from a very, very low base. economic development is actually a good news story. double-digit growth rates in afghanistan really for the past ten years. from, again, a very, very low base but fairly remarkable achievements there. cell phone penetration in afghanistan has gone from zero to well over 50% in the last ten years. and that is an important part of how information is transmit inside that country. this, i think, probably the area we're least effective both on the ground in afghanistan and here in the united states in the terms of communicating what it is we're trying to accomplish and demonstrating progress

toward those goals. so that's my general assessment of the counterinsurgency campaign. gradual progress more marked on the military side and with real problems in governance. i'll be interested to see what brian thinks. >> great. thanks, rudy. and before i start i would be remiss not to mention our colleagues carolyn and katherine who have worked in partnership with larry, and we've got a great team and a great series here, and we're glad that you're all here, and we're honored to have john here to take part in this discussion. i agree with much of what just john said and what i'll offer are complimentary observations about what's going on and then raise some broader points about the sustainability. of the strategy which, i think, is really important. i think it's pretty clear and we all read the same newspapers that there are improvements in

the security situation in certain parts of afghanistan. in the southern part of the country, and it's no surprise to me, we have the finest fighting force the world has ever known. you put them in a place, it will have an impact. and i think we've seen that in multiple occasions around the world. that said, we do have a deteriorating security situation in other parking lots of the country, and if you -- parts of the country, and if you judge this based on the core metric of counterinsurgency and, john, you wrote an article with nate thicke at the start of the obama administration which highlighted and reminded folks what counterinsurgency was. and it placed a premium on protecting the population and the civilians over killing the enemy. now, if you judge just based on that metric and look at 2010, 2010 was a very bad year for protecting the civilians of afghanistan, was the worst year, i think, since we've been in the country. and i think 2011 will be a moment of truth.

that said, and i think it's important to highlight that the 2700 or so afghan civilians who were kill inside violence in afghanistan in 2010, the vast majority of them were killed by the insurgents which, i think, will lead us into a deeper discussion about how you implement counterinsurgency, whether we have the capacity to do that and are we about to turn the corner as many people had argued, say, in the middle part of 2007 in iraq. but i would say that there are two main impediments that i think have been identified all along in the obama administration from all of this assessments from bruce riedel to the commander's assessment, general mcchrystal and others. two major impediments; pakistan and weak governance and corruption in afghanistan. here we are today two years later, and i would argue that we're not much further along in that. and we have serious questions about the sustainability of the

effort in afghanistan if we were to even leave or start to leave in 2011 with the goal of handing over security by 2014 which is the current plan whether things that we're helping to create will exist, and i know we'll get into this. there's also a broader question of the sustainability of a counterinsurgency effort which, as you know, began in earnest in 2009, but we'd been on the ground since 2001, 2002. and i think we'll get into this, i think, deeper in the discussion, but i think a lot of people are asking the question from a strategic level whether the costs actually are worth the benefits that it provides to u.s. national security interests. and i think that's sort of the deeper discussion. i know we'll talk about the tactics and the operations and different pieces. so, in essence, i think that we are still not out of the woods yet. i know we all look forward and commanders and people at the white house look for some sort of catch phrase. i think we're not certain in

terms of where we are. there's an improved security situation in a certain part of the country, but the real question i'd like to focus on is the sustainability of this. are we doing things that will actually last in the long run, and then secondly, will those things accrue to the benefit of u.s. national security interests. and i think those two questions are still very much open questions. >> thanks, brian and john, for getting us going. you know, let me put one question out there that i think you'll both agree on, and that brings us to the current budget deliberations that are going on on the hill. i think one of the things that we've learned that is a crucial component that complements our armed forces when they deploy are the career civilians that are at the state department and the u.s. agency for international development. they play a critical role, and i note their budget -- secretary gates has talked to john nagl and myself about this.

you know, the role of the diplomatic side and the career civilians on the agency for international development turn out to be key partners in this. it's been an initiative that both secretary clinton and secretary gates have spoken to, but i'd ask just before we really get in to strategies and lessons learned the criticality and what these budget cuts may mean to the long-term effort. >> this is, rudy's absolutely right, this is something we absolutely have not gotten right as a nation. counterinsurgency is not primarily military, as even general chiarelli's article pointed out that we drew from when we wrote the manual. unfortunately, only the military has the resources to operate in these conflict zones, and we have not properly resourced the civilian agencies who have greater background knowledge, greater and different skill sets in some of these areas.

and so we're left with military forces doing this all too often. we had, i think, a remarkable opportunity with the quadrennial diplomacy and development review launched by secretary clinton very early in her leadership of the state department. the qddr, i think, makes a pretty compelling argument for more resources, not fewer, for the state department and for usaid. unfortunately, in the current budget climate it looks as if it's dead on arrival, and that is an enormous risk to the progress, the fragile reversible gains we have made thus far in afghanistan. the budget numbers i just saw this morning, took a look at morning for the proposed cuts to the state department and to usaid put at risk all of the gains that general petraeus and his team, mcchrystal, mckiernan before them, have worked so hard to lock down for so many years. is and so i couldn't be more -- and so i couldn't be more

emphatic in agreeing with secretary gates and secretary clinton that this kind of war fight, a state department foreign service officer, a development specialist from usaid may be even more important than a soldier with boots on the ground. and we've got to get this right as a nation. we have not done that yet. >> i agree with that. we've been talking about that, though, for about five or six years now. and if we warrant going to assemble -- weren't going to assemble the political will and the courage to actually make those investments when we had a raging civil war in iraq, and if we're not going to make those investments while we've got 100,000 troops on the ground in afghanistan, i remain skeptical that we're going to get action out of congress. i agree with you, it should happen. but this is a function, i think, of having extended conflicts that go on for years at a time while at a time we've got economic troubles here at home. i really don't end i have some of our former -- envy some of

our former colleagues and others in government who are trying to implement the civilian surge which i think is really an important part of what we were trying to get right in afghanistan. at the start of the obama administration, we had about 300 personnel, civilian personnel who were working for the state department and usaid. and what they, in essence, have done is more than tripled the presence on the ground to about 91100 -- 1100 at this point. i went out in the fall of 2009 to camp attar bury with jack lew, the deputy secretary of state. and this is a camp where we were finally training people who were going out to serve on prts and other things, and i think it was an admirable effort. i think it was very important. but one thing that struck me was perhaps this was a little too late and a little too late. we talk so much about having civilian agency personnel who should b be deployable, but the simple pact of the -- fact of the matter is the way these agencies are structured, they don't have the time to prepare for deployment in the way that

military personnel do. i have friends who work in these agencies who are pulled away to offer training for some of these individuals, and the training program is often quite short compared to one we send our military personnel out there. you look at the budget systems and how things were handled. state department has 31/61 system for hiring short-term, temporary hires or usaid foreign service limited. these sorts of things, i think, these details are important because not getting that straight or forcing our civilian agencies to rely on temporary measures makes it very difficult to create a strategy that is sustainable in and of itself. and i know we're going to get to the problems on the ground in afghanistan and with our afghan partners, but it's not just about resourcing. at its core it is resourcing, but even if the money were available, there needs to be a systemic rethink in the civilian agencies at this point that haven't had to deal with how do

you rotate individuals in the large numbers just getting to that 1100 in terms of personnel. it took a lot of beg, borrowing and stealing. and there's tremendous talent and energy. they know the country, a lot of these people. but there are operational details how how can they get out and how well is strategy on civilian coordinated. and it should give us pause that more than five or six years into this push for smart power -- and it's been that, you know, this wasn't a creation of the obama administration, essentially when secretary gates came into office there was a much more stronger emphasis on this -- yet we haven't done it yet. and given where we are right now in a very uncertain period in afghanistan and given where we are in an uncertain moment politically here at home, i think it's fair to raise these skepticisms that our members of the congress and senate will actually come back with even stronger support than they've not offered to this point. >> i think that's a fair comment, brian. i note that if we were talking

with critical decision makers, in this case army captains or majors, or we went over and polled a class at the national defense university of u.s. service members who have served in the theater, at the top of their list of critical requirements would be more, more of the diplomatic and the usaid personnel. i think each marine that i've talked to has got a story. and so it is one of those disconnects. and, actually, it precedes secretary gates in this tour. we could go back to the late '80s and even to the '90s in particular and find at the time the civilians and their component was called operations other than war. and it was a particular dod acronym. but one of the things in the post-combat stage that is so critical is the development not just simply of security

institutions, and we'll talk about that because we should be training a police force and a military force right now, but it's creating administrative authorities that can apply justice and have remedies and that create long-term structures that have sort of make the gains that our military personnel are accomplishing now to make those gains irreversible later on. let me, then, ask john looking back on the approximately 16 months since the president's second troop surge in afghanistan and focusing particularly on security and the military component, what changes have we seen that are positive, what are negative? what parts of the surge have worked and what parts haven't? >> and i've already mentioned a little bit our ability to

conduct wide-area security, to control increasingly with the surge troops in the south in helmand we've created bubbles of security that we are now spreading out. and it's really classic counterinsurgency. we clear the taliban out of an area, it's a very tough fight, and then are able slowly to expand the classic oil spot of security with batallion commanders breaking their units down into very small teams, 12-marine teams spread across a much broader area and then integrating them with afghan security forces. so the process is working. we're seeing some good examples of it on the ground. rajiv had a front page piece in the post on sunday that talked to to some of the successes that he's seeing on the ground. so clear/hold/build works when we resource it properly. enormously resource-intensive

and the most important resource, of course, we're spending in afghanistan, the lives of our young men and women. we're at about 1500 u.s. kill inside action, more than 10,000 hurt over the past ten years of fighting there. and our allies have taken about another thousand killed. the brits most, the single largest foreign component of those losses. so this is slow, hard, grinding war. and it's always been that way, and it always will be that way. that is, that is no surprise. the, one of the interesting things that's happened that we're seeing in afghanistan that we started to see in the later years in iraq is that our focused counterterrorism operations against, initially against high-value targets and then as we've brought more resources over to afghanistan particularly from iraq but also some we're continuing to build

our capabilities here in the united states, we're getting more unmanned orbits up, we're getting better at colating different sources of human intelligence, electronic intelligence. we're increasingly able to target individuals very precisely, build cases against them before we have them in custody and then visit them with a much higher degree of precision than has ever been the case before. and this is an innovation that i think general mcchrystal, stan mcchrystal is owed an awful lot of credit for, and that's changing the dynamics inside the insurgency on the ground. and i think as we -- anytime you're evaluating a combat situation, you have much greater visibility of the costs for your side than you do have visibility into what's happening on the other side. and we're starting to get a better picture of what's happening inside various taliban cells. news reports have indicated that the taliban is now having a hard

time replacing it mid-level leaders. people are being offered promotions and not accepting them because the life span of their predecessors as free acts on the -- free agents on the battlefield is so short. so we're getting very good at disassembling terror networks from outside. there are costs as well as benefits of that. a lot of those mid-level leaders are people we'd actually like to talk with as we work on reconciliation and reintegration. we'll talk more about that later, i think. but this is, i think, a real innovation in the counterinsurgency campaign of being able to identify, track, target, locate and remove from the battlefield individuals with a pretty high degree of precision, and we're so much better at it that it's almost a difference, a qualitative difference in the fight on the ground. of. ..

much larger number of afghan soldiers on the ground for a million dollars invested than we do an american. every american soldier on the ground costs about a million dollars a year. that $10 million we're spending on afghan security forces this year is only 10% of the total we're investing in afghanistan. i would argue it is actually the most important in terms of enabling and allowing an exit strategy. we're making progress on professionalizing these forces.

over the last year we built service schools. we're teaching them how to fire artillery. training and educating helicopter pilots. we are making fairly, real progress and it is going to be a very long-term effort but i think american advisors required for a number of years. i want to just point to one of the real factors of difficulty. the literacy rates in afghanistan are simply deplorable and what we found is that to train people to be soldiers we have to teach them how to read and write and literally first grade level, third grade level, are the we're trying to achieve. first grade for soldiers. third grade for noncommissioned officers. it is impossible to have a modern army even an army that fight as counterinsurgency campaign in afghanistan if they can't read and write and can't take notes. if they can't read the serial number on their

rifle. interestingly we're getting better teaching them how to read and write. we find it is an extraordinary retention advantage. they desperately want to know how to read and write. the ability to do so and promise of additional school something one of the factors that led to increased retention recently. i will say two more things and then yield. we are increasingly starting to build a program called afghan local police. local village militia forces. this is traditional effort in counterinsurgency campaigns. there is always a danger the militia will have loyalties other than to the afghan government. we played this game before and we're getting better at this process. this pilot is showing real progress in increasing number of boots on the ground. finally we're seeing great results from partnering with afghan units once they're formed. we're partnering american, nato, other allied units with them and conducting joint operations at a much higher rate than we used to, all in an effort to increase

the afghans learning curve in order to make it a realistic possibility we'll be able to hand over security responsibility to them in the lead for most, if not all of their country by the end of 2014. >> okay. we're going to go, i'm going to ask brian a question. we're going one more round of long answers and tighten it up a little and go back and forth. i feel like i'm back where i was when i was a young staffer at the armed services committee and cap weinberger was taking whole time for giving the answer. we're going to give brian one long answer here and we're going to start to see the differences. >> okay. >> you know, pakistan and then the governance in afghanistan clearly, as hard as our military men and women are working, pakistan and the governance questions in afghanistan remain. brian, you've been an

election observer in pakistan but particularly most recently in the 2009 presidential elections in afghanistan. and so, give us your assessment on how afghanistan's political and governance challenges sort of intersect with our own security objectives in the theater. >> well, it's clear. this is the weakest part of the strategy and we agree with this. everything that john just articulated with the investment. and quite massive invests for a country the size of afghanistan to invest, 10 billion in the security forces. when the government itself, the afghan government has a budget of 3 to 4 billion each year. serious sustainability questions of investing that amount of money, upwards of $100 billion the u.s. effort will be this year. and whether this money is actually having the impact. i think it's fair to raise the question, is more better

in a place like afghanistan on both the security and then also on the governance and economic development front? i want to highlight the second piece of this i came back from afghanistan in 2009, really struck with one central question. do we have a partner in the afghan government at multiple levels? we observed that election, stayed engaged on i think the extensive efforts to try to build governance and democracy in these electoral systems and the institutions. this often sound soft but very much the thing we were talking about earlier. it is the fabric to which these security organizations, the police and army, need to connect to at some point for it to sustain itself going back to that question of sustainability. and i think even more than two years into this there are serious questions about not only the capacity because there's challenges of capacity but also the willingness and the political intention of some of our partners in the

afghan government. look at the kabul bank fiasco, the country's largest bank i think was just taken over by the central bank. nearly a billion dollars in assets, money was use in there, to buy property in dubai by some people who were part of the leadership in afghanistan. money was sent in these campaigns including the campaign that we witnessed in 2009, to develop patronage networks in there. dexter fikkins of "the new york times" has done great reporting on the ground. he said no longer enough to say the corruption permeates the afghan state. corruption by and large is the afghan state. if we have hundreds of millions of dollars in the keybanc which u.s. taxpayer money has gone through to help pay for afghan civil servants salaries and to pay for some of the afghan national security forces, if we can't account for that

money and this doesn't even talk about sort of all of the other flows that are going out there through usaid, through commander emergency response funds. i have yet to see a comprehensive assessment i think of the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction offered sort of tactical assessments but i haven't seen an overall assessment of the resources that have been committed over the last two years and measuring the effects of those resources particularly on the governance structures. there is a very strong argument to be made that the strategy which is now centered on a counterinsurgency strategy, we're using our resources and our power as a weapon against us inadvertently. we're not obviously trying to do that. we're trying to identify gaps and whols in the strategy. we have a senior commander working on anti-corruption initiatives but there's a serious question i think that is out there, do we have a seriousness of purpose from our afghan partners that i know most of,

all of our troops, most of our troops share out there. people are serving in the u.s. government. i think this is why we go back to that question why can't we get political support on capitol hill? there's this question of the viability of all of this. that if the two big gaping holes that have been repeatedly identified, the rural pakistan and afghan governance and their political institutions those two big gaping holes, if those two aren't fundamentally addressed doesn't make sense to continue on the current path and current strategy. it doesn't line up with the president's stated objectives, disrupt, dismantle and defeat al qaeda in both afghanistan and pakistan. i know we need a separate panel, i know this is my long answer here but i think pakistan is the biggest complication. my only observation there is that i fear that our strategic focus has been flipped in the wrong direction. i know we're in afghanistan because we've been there and we need to get right. but when i go to pakistan and i see what is happening

in pakistan nearly every single day, the news this morning they test ad surface-to-surface missile that is capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. their nuclear arsenal is growing. the cooperation, there has been a real serious attempt by the obama administration to enhance that cooperation is breaking down with the pakistani government. i fear we're out of balance. i said this several times. i fear we're focused on hamlets and villages in southern afghanistan when the real threat potentially to u.s. national security interests is across the border. that we've got an imbalance of resources in both terms of money and senior leadership attention. >> okay. so that sort of frames it. because on one hand you've got discussion of a strategy that if you resource the security side and you have enough troops in country they're capable of having a significant impact. on the other you've got, let's just right now for this round focus on the

vulnerability with pakistan, sort of being both a sanctuary and a safe haven. i talked to some of our military folks and they distinguish a sanctuary where actually your adversary can go hide and be protected versus a safe haven where the adversary can go across the border and because nobody's there, they're essentially using the international boundary to, you know, to get away from the u.s. forces. but, with pakistan being a place of sanctuary and safe haven, can the clear, hold, build ever work, no matter how well it's resourced in afghanistan? john? >> this is now short answer to that? >> short answer. >> short answer, save the hard question for the short answer. pakistan is in my eyes the most dangerous place in the world for the united states. it has, faces an extraordinary combination of

a number of internal insurgencies. it is the home base for al qaeda central. weak democracy. large number and growing number of nuclear weapons as brian mentioned. it has over time, i think, come to recognize and it, speaking of pakistan as one entity is ludicrous simplification. there are fractals and wheels within wheels inside pakistan but increasingly i think members of the pakistani military, the pakistani intelligence service, the governing elite in the country are coming to recognize that the insurgent forces which they created which they have supported in many ways as an insurance policy against, against an afghanistan that is ruled by india, is closely in india's orbit, that insurance policy they have created and funded is increasingly turning against them. and we literally, daily see

evidence of attacks on pakistani civilians, on pakistani government targets, conducted by the some of these pakistani militant groups. so we've seen slow, halting, very, two steps forward, one step back progress, i believe by the pakistani government in terms of clearing and holding the swat river valley. south waziristan. promises and clear and hold north waziristan were upset by the flooding and interestingly, just over the weekend, very high level delegation of pakistanis to kabul to talk with president can karzai about reconciliation and reintegration about the possibility of bringing the war to some sort of negotiated settlement that at the very highest levels. so general kiani, the head of the pakistani military.

the pakistan is a classic friend and enemy. it is, its actions will ultimately, are ultimately likely to be prove decisive inside afghanistan and there are glimmers of hope there i think and i'm going to be interested to see if brian thinks those glimmers are too hopeful? >> i'm very pessimistic these days about pakistan. i was more bullish i would say a year or so ago. i think the breakdown that we're seeing between the u.s. and pakistan on security coordination is very real and i think it is multifaceted. and i think there's nothing we can do but continue to work that issue. we will never have boots on the ground or substantial boots on the ground in pakistan. we need to work those relationships as best we can and understand that the fissures are very real within the pakistani government. we know the civilian and security divide but there are serious divisions within the security agency too.

understanding who is doing what and understanding that game i think is more essential than most of what we're doing in afghanistan at this point. i know you might disagree with that but from the perspective the u.s. national security interests, when you look at groups like the remnants of al qaeda, a range of groups that have free reign in pakistan. the simple fact of the matter it is not only how they assess their own security situation, it is also who they see as potential force multipliers and how they see the threats around them. and i've been in the isi headquarters, in islamabad a number of times including, in 2009 and it's clear we're not on the same page. and it's not easy i think for people at the most senior levels of the u.s. government to understand what the pakistani security establishment inches tension is even at this phase. i don't know. i know, i understand your analysis of how this visit this weekend may be an opening but i'm not so certainty stage because

we've had previous openings and previous exchanges at this point and one of the fundamentals is, you know, the security situation itself in pakistan has deteriorated. there is this lack of coordination i talked about where we have talked to senior pakistani security officials who say look, in addition to the drone strikes which for the most part privately they will say they're in favor of, they're dealing with a serious threat, we don't have serious coordination on the eastern side of afghanistan border. there is concern that part of the strategy implemented by mcchrystal, people often talked about sort of our surge being a hammer-and-anvil with our forces being the hammer pushing them against some sort of anvil in pakistan. they have the same sort of perception that if they were to strike in certain places and there were a number of operations on the western border of pakistan, mostly, you know, surprised to hear that the pakistani air force actually conducts more

bombings themselves on their population and their threat than we do drone strikes. there have been significant costs. but there is this perception that, okay, well, if we're hitting the threat in pakistan inside our borders why have you withdrawn some of your troops from the eastern part of afghanistan? i don't know who is correct but there is clearly as we were implementing the surge in afghanistan a lack of coordination and a lack of common understanding of the threat perceptions. to answer your question, this is very long, no, i don't think we'll actually see stability in afghanistan without getting on the same page with pakistan. we may be heading there at some point but the recent metrics i see are pointing in the wrong directions for u.s. pakistan cooperation. >> one more word about that i want to give a shoutout to admiral mullen who worked this enormously hard. pretty much every month he is there or kayani is here. he put enorm murs personal

resources in this stressing importance he plays on it. his departure from joint chiefs of staff later this year which will be a number of transitions that will dramatically affect the conduct of our operations in afghanistan and pakistan. you know we lost ambassador holbrooke. replaced with general grossman. general petraeus likely to leave later this year. rumors he will be replaced by lt. general allen of the marines. interesting choice. he played a very large role developing reintegration options in iraq. general rodriguez, general petraeus's deputy will be replaced this year. rumors general eikenberry may also be rotating out. huge changes in both the leadership and political and military level over a fairly short period of time and those personal relationships that those officers foreign service officers, military officers, developed in afghanistan and pakistan are some of the most important assets we have in this fight and so that period of

transition over the course of this year is i something to watch very carefully. >> so, okay. at least you're talking back and forth to each other now. so we're not -- so when i started i said here we are. it's april 2011. now tora bora where we had the safe havens and sanctuaries of pakistan, are an issue in 2001, 2002. so we've known about this problem on the pakistani side now, it will be a decade, decade very soon. so we've got this conflict. you know it is almost straight out of the hollywood movie where the bad guys is right across the boundary and our respect of international law, you know, we don't follow into those safe havens and sanctuaris. so on one hand we've got our

troops struggling, working very hard, making an enormous sacrifice and on the other we continue to have this back door that's a problem. here we come up now to two dates, july 2011, and then 2014 as the nato-announced end of sort of the military phase in afghanistan. so, you know, how do these two dates come to play you know, still given these uncertainties? and this is no great illumination. this is woodward's book. this is, you know, these are the earlier studies. these are "the new york times" reporting on tora bora and the cornering of osama bin laden only then to

be waved off by the tribal leaders saying we've got it from here. i think john's right. i think admiral mullen has been hugely significant on his senior military to military relationships not only in pakistan but in egypt. but we're thinner at the, sort of the field grade officer which are so critical on the decision-making. so let's take this tension point between, sort of the clear, hold, build on the security side, the sanctuaries and safe havens on the other and then the approaching july 2011 and 2014 decisions. how do you start to reconcile and balance your opportunity cost versus the blood and treasure that is being expended every day? >> i don't think that the july 2011 date means much more these days, except for the beginning of a transition. i think, it is my view we need to be serious about

this transition phase and defining what transition actually means. we had a panel here about a month or so ago, caroline was on and your colleague david, here we are, starting a transition but nobody fully defined metrics for what that transition means clearly from a security and importantly from a governance standpoint. and i'm a timeline guy. i have said and i know people dispute that i think it is an honest debate to be had. i honestly think many people in this administration believe you need time lines to focus not only the minds of leaders like karzai, but also to focus the agendas and strategies of large bureaucracies that won't move. so a lot of the problems that i think we talked about, with the governance and corruption and other things i think, if used properly, and you have to be careful about how you balance all of this, you don't, certainly want to leave the methods that you're just going to

abandon carelessly everything we invested for a period of time. but i think the most dangerous thing for to us do at this point is to continually go back and ask for more time because why? it actually fosters this dangerous and i think dysfunctional culture of dependency that feeds and fuels the problems that we have on the ground right now. and that i do think, i know we're not talking about the past but in iraq there was a confluence of forces that helped contribute to greater stability and then also iraqi ownership and leadership of that and managing it and having all of these pieces and attributing sort of security success and still do this date, quite limited political success, to not only our own resources but how we use those resources to motivate leaders to take charge like we saw with maliki. i think a real key component in this period of 2011, if this is start of transition to 2014 how do you shape

calculus like a man like karzai and foester leadership. how do you foster new leadership that come after him? i know people are talking about this in various working groups and thinking about it. it is a very hard thing to do especially as i said, expending a lot of resources that can not be absorbed like a small and poor country like afghanistan. how do you focus the minds of these leaders? i think this period should be used as a period i think to help build the security forces. do what we can to build, help build governance because, at the core, i think one question is political legitimacy in these societies and how a leader becomes legitimate. but i think there's, a key dynamic here to use this moment to focus the minds of the leadership in afghanistan, the leadership in pakistan to send a signal that we are serious about drawing down our resource support and that means greater responsibility on your part and facilitating that through diplomacy. to send a signal to our

bureaucracies that we are serious about moving forward with this transition. and then importantly i think the cost is a huge issue because, as we talked about many times before, we won't be aable to continue to spend the levels we've been spending in wars like afghanistan. >> this is probably the clearest point of distinction between brian and myself, so far at least, stand by, there may be more but i would argue that president karzai's mind is pretty sharp and pretty focused already. the concern i have is that he has been playing general kayani has been playing for the day after the americans leave. i think that was a misinterpretation in the region of the july 11 date which i do think is going to be the beginning of a transition but was viewed by many people in theater in the region as a complete pullout sort of date. i think that lisbon resolved a lot of those fears but i do think that the reality of

lisbon is just now being digested. one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing that is going to happen in afghanistan this year i expect a strategic partnership declaration between the united states and afghanistan leading to a long-term security relationship between the two countries. and once that is signed and the region digests a long-term security relationship between the u.s. and afghanistan, that i think is going to change further change the calculus of the players in the region. and i see a very long tail to our involvement in afghanistan. i see advisory and assistance presence long past 2014. and i think that the american people will support that as long as american casualties are low and they can see the progress is being made and i agree that the july of this year date is the start of a drawdown. i think we could have a lot of debate over what the

slope of that is going to be. i think that putting a strategic framework declaration is starting to think now about what after that, that slope levels off at the end of 2014, what that force is going to look like of some 10,000, 15,000, largely advisors, intelligence assets, air force assets. i think that will go a long way toward helping everybody make their long-term calculations for what the state of play is going to be. >> chair's prerogative. help me. is the, lisbon, you're right, less emphasis on july 2011 but definite emphasis to 2014 is the end of the nato combat operation. are you saying that 014 2014 is a firm date or maybe just another date that's thrown out there? >> the lisbon declaration said that by the end of 2014 ouldan security forces w

the country. from president karzai. that's his goal and his objective and i think in some breaks coming our way, i think that is likely but the end of combat operations as we've seen in iraq which happened in august of last year does not mean that withdrawal of all american troops. in fact we've had 50,000 troops in iraq conducting advise and assist missions. there is some possibility they will be asked by the iraqi government to stay longer in iraq and secretary gates indicated he would be likely to view that favorably. i think in the same way we're going to see a long-term advise and assist presence in afghanistan with, again in s had. alah a small number of u.s. casualties but continuing to develop the afghan ability to govern themselves and secure themselves. >> okay. so one of the things that has been unique about the status of force agreement in

iraq is that for the, which was concluded in december 2008, is that it's almost been a formula type exit and it has been very smooth and the transfer of authorities, very, very clear-cut. would it be your view that this security arrangement between the united states and afghanistan would be similar and would spell out the transition from nato to afghanistan forces, or would there be more ambiguity? >> i don't think this strategic partnership declaration will have that. i think those will be separate documents which will be negotiated differently. this is purely a u.s.-afghanistan relationship document. the nato handover i think is going to be conducted in a different forum but i do think the reason they handover has been so smooth is that the political situation on the ground

changed fairly dramatically by the end of 2008 in iraq and allowed for the smooth transition and drawdown we've seen since then. it is going to be important that not just that the capabilities of the afghan governance and security forces improve between now and 2014 but also that the taliban becomes less capable over that same time period. we're doing some pretty good work in making that happen. >> if i would add, it is not just the security agreement but in iraq also there was a separate strategic framework agreement which sent the signal of enduring support and cooperation on a range of issues including police and security work and the state department and also economic development in a range of things. the state department, now the ball is starting to be in their court especially if this transition is executed. i'm not so certain iraqis may ask us to stay around for number of political reasons related to their own environment. . .

>> the incentive structures were quite different, and i think most people understand and, again, there's a range of issues, and it wasn't just about the introduction of additional u.s. forces. there were a number of factors that at this day in april 2011 i don't see present b in afghanistan pushing the reconciliation or reintegration at two different levels, pushing people into a political process. nor do i expect that it would when you rook at electoral processes like we've just seen

in 2009 and 2010 or when you look at the rampant corruption among afghan officials and just the waste of resources. so that's a substantially different, i think, dynamic which relates to both countries' different histories and sort of their experiences with governance which, i think, presents a strategic challenge for even moving forward with long-term security agreements if we don't know who our partner's going to be, you know, in the long run after 2012, 2014. >> so i would now like to open up the program to questions from the audience. we've got half an hour the go. to go. and so we'll start with this gentleman against the glass wall in the corner. >> thank you, gentlemen. my name is john. i want to ask, if you wouldn't mind if i not state my agency because i'm expressing personal perspectives here, but i did spend four years in afghanistan, just got back again several

weeks ago. brian, my mindset is pretty much along the lines what you're talking about. and, john, i agree with a lot of what you said, but i want to challenge you just on a couple of key points, and that's i don't believe we are really doing a coined strategy there. and this might be something in your studies and with the officials that you talk to to explore that a bit. certainly, at the strategic level mcchrystal, petraeus, a lot of the usg officials, all our strategic documents do say that, but at the tactical/operational level it's really a stability fight because we're just never going to resource the coin fight. and i think it came out in this discussion that, certainly, the support we would need from the hill on this is not going to increase. so we can certainly clear and hold any place we want in the south and the east, but the problem is having an honest broker in the afghan government as partners which, i think, you

both mentioned. and that's just not there. the ill literacy deals not only with the soldiers, but with the afghan officials. and because of what's going on in the security or environment, you know, if it calls for 60 positions in, for example, a delivery program, the most they'll get is ten people, maybe three competent. so we can't get to the hold and build piece. so i'm arguing we're going to be managing the problem from here, and that might be just something to bring out in your discussions in if relation to pakistan -- in relation to pakistan. the only thing i'd say on the transition piece, i think you're both right on this. i think the afghans have a deep fear of what those dates mean. i think a strategic agreement would help, but i think what we haven't done so far is the messaging. my discussion with the afghans they really do believe that we're not going to be there long term. you talk to the usg officials, they'll say, no, we're going to be there until 2024, '25 with

the longer-term stuff that we have to do which is a longer discussion in the transition, but certainly the afghans fear that, and i'll just leave it at that. it's less of a question than just more some of the context i'm getting from the field because we're not getting to the impacts that we want in the counterinsurgency strategy. >> brief comments? >> just quickly. john, thanks for your service and the time you've put on the ground there. this is the, to me, one of the huge tragedies of afghanistan. that we've been there so long, and that we neglected and all but ignored the raising of afghan security forces from the very weak human capital that was there after 30 years of war. so we're able to clear and hold, but we have to hold with u.s. troops, nato troops because we don't have an afghan partner to hand off to, and i would argue we're five years behind on raising afghan security forces from where we ought to be. and when, so that when the political leadership in iraq

decided that it was going to play, the iraqi security forces were actually, had a pretty high degree of capability given the threat they faced. and in afghanistan we're working from just ground level to try to build that capability, and it's one of the reasons why i think we're going to have such a long tail of advise and assist as we continue to build these afghan forces to hold off to -- hand off to. >> i mean, those are great points. again, thank you for your service there. the question i'd raise again, and i started at the outset, is that all of the moving pieces and the investments, and i don't think we've covered this in our discussion yet, how much does it matter for u.s. national security interests at this point? i, in essence, agree with john's assessment about pakistan being a very dangerous country. it changes the dynamics, i think, in the middle east, and yemen in some ways may present a more imminent threat if you're looking at it from the

perspective of u.s. homeland security. and i might then ad lib ya, too, in the complicated dynamics we have to see there. but if you look at it from that perspective which i think was the perspective many people had heading in there in afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, i think we're a far ways from what it is we're trying to get done, and there's this disconnect that i've noticed in many think tank reports, but also in the president's speeches and in strategy documents that are produced by the various agencies. it identifies a clear goal of dismantle and defeat al-qaeda in the these two countries. and then it also says we're not doing nation building, and they take great pains. president obama stressed this again in his speech of november 2010, but then most of what we're doing in the documents and a lot of what we're doing, in essence, you can fairly call if we're not doing it ourselves, we're trying to get others to do nation building, but we're bearing a heavy burden, both our

development professionals and especially our military to try to help the afghans help themselves. and we've lost sight of the connection between those two things. i know people make those arguments, but i think there's a reason why we don't debate afghanistan as vociferously as we did iraq. but part of it is just a general confusion among american publics, not only the public messaging problem in afghanistan, but in the u.s. people understanding that which, you know, the commanders and others are saying. and there's a seeming disconnect of why is it we're trying to grow literacy in a place like afghanistan, and how does that relate to keeping us safe from another attack? and i just think it's a very hard sell in this current political environment here at home. >> right here. >> rachel martin with npr. i wanted to ask about u.s. efforts in if bringing about peace talks and a negotiated settlement that everyone agrees has to happen in order to bring conclusion to the war in

afghanistan. can you talk a little bit about what you know of u.s. efforts to ignite these talks, and more specifically what pakistan's role should be in these talks should pakistan get a seat at that table, or are they potentially a destabilizing influence on those talks? >> well, i don't think we want to preempt the second panel, but i'll say a few things, and maybe john can add to it. this has been identified, this piece of reconciliation and reintegration as a key part of the strategy, and in the conversations we've had with friends who are working on this issue, they've been studying the issue, they're looking at the issue. they've been looking at reports like the one that will be discussed at this point. there have been efforts, as we know, that have been well reported where somebody who claimed to be a taliban leader got into kabul and had discussions with people when it turned out he didn't have that credibility that he claimed to have. so i think it's very complicated. and the one question i would raise and to bring the discussion back to john is the

question of, yes, we are hitting the insurgency very hard, but there's a rell question of does that actually -- real question of does that actually deter the possibility, if you're cutting off the command and control, do you make it much more difficult and impossible to create a political settlement that is viable in the long run? i think there's a general perception, and people have talked about the military hitting the insurgency very hard. this would increase the calculus to enter into a political process, but we've not seen that yet in a clear way. again, i think the second panel will discuss that, but why is that? and is it because there's a fracturing that's going on as a con scwebs of -- consequence of, i think, probably well thought out and well-intentioned military cam pays. but it may take us further from our goal. the reintegration efforts, i don't think it's met yet the expectations or hopes that people had, say, when initial investments were made in early part of last year at the london

conference. so all of those pieces, i think, are very ill-formed, and the last thing i would say is that in some way it needs to connect back to this issue of governance and the political system and structure in afghanistan. people often, i think, put it in some sort of isolated bubble like a peace process that we could set up, say like the dayton accords, or we look for models and things like this. the one thing that really needs to be, i think, discussed -- and the next panel will talk about this -- is that this is about power sharing. and this is trying to get groups that are reconcilable and can move beyond those three nos which used to be at the front end of discussions and talks and now, as secretary clinton talked about, are now on the back end. reject al-qaeda. if that's the case, then what is on the table in terms of the discussions in reconciliation at high level? >> uh-huh. and brian just pointed to the difference between reconciliation, reintegration. reconciliation, high-level

political decisions, reintegration is low-level fighters. we've seen some pretty good progress on reintegration, starting to see small groups of taliban, as many as 50 at a time, deciding it isn't fun anymore and deciding to join the afghan government and afghan security forces. i think as with everything in afghanistan the government has, has not been as responsive or as proactive in terms of providing those offramps for the taliban, and i'm hopeful we're going to see more progress there. i do think that the reconciliation process is going to be more difficult in afghanistan than it was in iraq. in iraq saddam actually encouraged the tribal nature society, reinforced it, used it to his own purposes. in afghanistan the tribes have been shattered by the many years of conflict there. and so i don't think we're going to see a large flip, a single large flip as we did in iraq over the course of 2007, 2008. i think we're going to see a number of small flips.

and so it's going to be harder, it's going to be more, it's going to put more demands on low-level, largely soldiers. we go back to the problem of not having sufficient civilian resource to do this who, presumably, are better schooled in it. and it is interesting at least that lieutenant general john allen who played a huge role in the awakening in the iraq is now being considered to replace general petraeus. not a lot of afghanistan time on the ground, but an understanding of how these processes work and a real personal willingness to talk with people who have been our enemies and try to get them to come onboard and come out of the cold. and can that, i think -- and that, i think, that reconciliation/reintegration process over the next year is going to be the key story. >> um, the lady back against the wall. >> thank you.

kimberly doze your from the associated press. one quick comment before i throw some gas on the fire with some questions. just got back from from pakistan and sat down with the 13th corps commander and a couple of the folks that work for him, and they talked about having close cooperation with general campbell nrc east on the border situation. they said it's gotten a lot better than six months ago. so that might be something too, you know? i'm an american reporter, maybe they were telling me what i want to hear, but i hadn't heard of any incidents on the border, so maybe one positive sign. on the positive signs in security, what happens if this summer the white house decides to go down 25% in forces by the end of the year? is there a chance of upsetting the progress by taking too many people out too fast? and another question, you all keep -- i keep hearing about the

civilian surge, but the latest reports i'd heard in kabul were that something like two-thirds of the embassy employees who were supposed to work outside the embassy couldn't leave the embassy because of security concerns. while i was there almost nobody could leave isaf headquarters either. is it time to recognize that the folks you'd like to give this job to simply can't get to it, and it does have to remain the province of the military? and then third question, you've talked about the need to get rid of corruption in the afghan government, but what tools are available to the u.s. military or the ambassador when this is a democratically-elected government doing what it wants to do, and it seems like every time we investigate and uncoffer something they upend the investigation? that's it. >> so, kimberly, it's always great to see you. and seeing you reminds us about our troops and particularly

those on the medical side. it's a pleasure to have you here. well, look, i think, first, on your second question i'd respond to, i think if you look at the dod directive that was put out in 2008 on a regular warfare, it already made that decision in terms of the military personnel will take the lead. if civilian agencies aren't capable. and that's what happened in iraq, as you know. i wrote about this in a book i wrote in 2008 in the first chapter where a guy who was trained to drive tanks had to end up doing the job of what the prt was supposed to do. and part of it is related to those issues i was talking about. it's not simply about funding. yes, that's a core issue. but even if state department and usaid got a lot more money and a plus-up in their budget, there's absorptive capacity challenge they have themselves and then i think essentially since 1998, since the bombings of the embassies in africa, they have adopted a force posture that is

even more risk averse. so that's a huge challenge that has not been reconciled. the downside to going where i think your question implies we should go is the continued militarization of development assistance which creates a lot of dysfunctions on the ground in afghanistan and iraq and a number of places. we know not what we do, and we often spend a lot of money and bolster certain local forces without having enough intelligence. i think we've gotten smarter to a certain extent, but that when you, you know, a big challenge, i think, on the civilian side of trying to scale this up. we've not yet addressed that. if we go down that path of the military should just do this, then you continue to have problems which, i think, are fundamental and core to the problems of counterinsurgency generally. one being that the foreign troop presence in many places is just simply not welcomes, that in some cases causes more security challenges than they actually

seek to address. it's very costly in the long run because we invest a lot more in these forces. and great point on pakistan. i'm glad to hear that news. the question i have is even if you have a quiet period of six months of cooperation, do we see -- the point i'm making is do we see the strategic threats, and are we on the same page? i think there's a lot of work to be done, clearly. you know, the public statements, i think, and the dust-ups belie a cooperation that continues and endures because there are some common interests there. but also those public statements that are made by both pakistan and u.s. officials point to some serious problems that have not yet been fundamentally addressed which go back to not just tactical cooperation on important issues like border patrol, but strategic cooperation and making sure that we're on the same page. i hope that we'll actually do this, and i should be quiet. [laughter] >> no. kimberly, i want to draw you on

your first point, actually, i was very surprised because you seemed to me to indicate that american reporters want to hear good news which i had never understood to be the case. i am, also, hearing some indications that border -- on both sides of the border that we're getting closer and better, so i'm pleased to hear that you were told and given some indications of the same thing. general petraeus is, of course, staying in afghanistan through this fighting season. he's going to make a recommendation to the president on what the pace and scale, slope of the withdrawal will look like. because of the discussion i had with john, the limited capability of afghan security forces to hand over to the forces that we've cleared and are now holding, i predict that petraeus and the commanders on the ground will try to hold on to as many u.s. troops, nato troops for as long as they can as they simultaneously work to

build afghan security forces. they can feel confident handing control of clear territories off to and as they also continue to put pressure on the taliban. so i think we're going to see a very interesting civil-military tug-of-war, and i think the decision will, ultimately, be one that recognizes the continuing strain on the force, the continued dollar costs that brian has talked about but, also, the extraordinary cost of giving back some of the gains that we purchased at such a high price. um, putting tank drivers in command of prts actually isn't that bad contrary to popular rumors about tank drivers. [laughter] when we were putting nuclear submariners in charge of provincial reconstruction teams, that's wrong on every level. the money we've invested in those specialized skill sets, it's hard to imagine somebody less, less predisposed to

understanding how to operate in that environment, and they're very, very bright people, but we do have -- i want to say one word in the defense of civilians. we do have people who have worked government support teams in garmsir, he's going to come back just before his first child is born. we've got some high quality people in there out in the field taking the risks. not as many as we need, and i think as a nation we need to have a discussion about whether this capability which we keep discovering we need more of where we're going to actually make the investment as a nation in it, i think the return on investment is enormously high. and just underlining the importance of that, of those decisions we have got brigadier general h. republican mcmaster, another tank driver, working the anticorruption issues with the afghan government. enormously bright, talented bulldog of a man but probably not the right skill set. somebody we'd probably rather have a civilian expert working

that, the corruption problem for us. so we're seeing pretty heroic efforts by the folks we do have on the ground. we haven't yet built all of the capabilities we need to back here to deploy forward to increase our chances for success. >> just one thing on security gains. i think it's really important for people who are making the decisions here to keep focused on the threat to the united states, and if we start talking about and making arguments related to some costs and whether or not we need to stay there because we're there, that's a very dangerous thing because it takes us further away from the reason why we're there. and i really think that, you know, there's a dangerous dynamic to talk about security gains after a year that was the deadliest year for afghan civilians, 2010, since we've been there. so, yes, as i said in the intro, localized security gains, a security situation that remains uncertain and actually has

gotten worse in other parts of the country, and then the reason i think it's important to go back to our focused goal on the terrorist threat is because if we don't do that, we'll continue to be in this circular argument of how do we actually administer resources at a time when it's just not going to be politically viable later this decade to continue to do that. >> we'll go to this gentleman in the front row. if you just wait for the microphone so that the audience watching can -- >> hi, i'm doug. i'd like to ask the two political questions. i'll state 'em explicitly but then commentate them both a little bit. first, do we need an explicit statement or restatement of american policy from this president? john alluded to the fact that both our friends and enemies in the region seem to have misread what the president has said. i don't think very many parallels between iraq and afghanistan are helpful, but if you compare it with president bush's january 2007 speech, you may have liked it, you may have disliked it, but you didn't walk

away wondering what he had said. we do seem to have some confusion about what july 2011 means. both of you seem to try to walk the president back off of that, but he has declined to do so, most mote my repeating that in the state of the union speech. that's the only afghanistan statement i remember hearing in january. so does the president need to make an explicit statement of u.s. policy so that we can get cooperation from our partners in the region and, for that matter, state our long-term commitments that our enemies might relook their commitments and strategy? is and, second, just taking a quick look at the afghan constitution we've made it clear as you said, brian, that, you know, we're still making that some type of precondition, acceptance of the afghan constitution, but at the same time that's clearly a document that is, couldn't have been designed better to maximize corruption despite our and the international community largely imposing that on them. as i tell people your audience may not understand the afghan constitution. picture america in which the

president can appoint all 50 state governors and every county commissioner in the america, and, you know, while that might be popular here given the current president, that wouldn't play well in idaho, georgia, nor does it play well in their afghan analogs. what steps can and should we take to do a relook at the afghan constitution? >> i'll let john take the political question because he's the politician. [laughter] on all of this. but, first, it's not a precondition anymore except in the constitution. i think you said precondition and that, i think, is the importance of hillary clinton, secretary clinton's speech earlier this year which made it a little bit more open. and i don't think we fully and adequately answered rachel's question, but i think the next panel will o do that in terms of what's going on. but i think that was an important shift and change. and the only point i would make is that this is hard to do. i raised this in my analysis on iraq quite a lot, and i actually thought at one point mistakenly that constitutional reform was

essential, and this was part of sort of the key benchmarks and other things. i still think it's essential for the long-term sustainability, viability and power sharing in a place like iraq, and i do think it's also the case in afghanistan. my own point was how do you actually connect the internal political processes and also multiple processes, some of which are driven by our own security establishment and the different committees that are developed at local levels and other things? nobody has drawn all these pieces together and then connected to the constitution which is quite flawed and then do it in a way that allows the afghans to drive this process. and that's, i think, a deeper, longer discussion than simply how do we actually get to a security agreement for the longer term. all of these things need to be threaded well together. my answer to your question is we don't know sort of that pathway until we engage with the afghan leadership and the full range of it. and what they would like to do.

becausewe're seen driving that process, the we being the u.s. or international community, then there's this problem of legitimacy. if we let them sort of lead, and i saw this in iraq and other places. in a political development, this is a big challenge. i saw this in egypt when we were trying to help promote democracy 15, 20 years ago. there's this sort of if you do too much yourself as outsiders, then you taint the process. if you don't do enough to push -- so there requires a deftness and coordination of diplomacy that i've not seen yet coming from the united nations, the u.s. diplomats spanning across a number of different, different administrations. so perhaps less is more. >> first, doug, thanks for your service. doug just spent the last year working at rc east with general caldwell advising him as part of our counterinsurgency advise and assist teams, something i think has accelerated the learning properties in the department of -- process in the department of defense. i'll talk to your question about

political will and political understanding here, if i can. i thought that the president was very clear at lisbon. the nato secretary general, nick rasmussen, who's been fantastic in building nato support, admiral staph' it is a, the nato commander, also very good. and we saw a fairly remarkable event, i thought, at lisbon in december in which the understood american departure date shifted about three years to the right with astonishingly not a ripple in the american body politic. and that, i find, astounding. i don't think it resounded as deeply in theater. i think that they are still thinking 2011, and i don't think anything the president says or does between now and july will change that. i think when they still see lots and lots of american boots on the ground in the fall of this year and into 2012, that that will be what really changes the

calculus of the people on the ground. although as i said, i think the political leaps in the both pakistan and afghanistan and the region are starting to understand that america is committed for the long haul. i think that the fact that the american people although public opinion polls suggest diminution of american support right around the 50% level, the depth of that feeling is not very strong. it was not an issue in the midterms, and what we're seeing is, i think, an american faith in general petraeus personally and in the american troops on the ground to make this thing come out to some reasonable degree of satisfaction. >> well, i want to thank both of you for participating in this discussion. um, one of the reasons that we're doing this series is to continue a policy debate. i can't think of a time in the washington where there have been

as many hot button issues all on the agenda at the same time. from the budget to the debt extension to taxes to medicare and the other entitlements, and yet we have 130,000 troops that are in afghanistan, we have core policy issues there, and i think we deserved them a continuation of the debate that we focus on these issues and we really, also, try to inform ourselves this terms of lessons that we should be learning for the future. i know in my tenure at the pentagon the notion of a ten-year war which is likely to be 12 or 13 in afghanistan with a huge disruption in the middle that will be debated by historians for a generation in terms of the swing to iraq and to the neglect of afghanistan in

2004. but that with our troops in the field we're going to continue this series. i want to thank brian katulis for his contribution, and i want to thank our guest and visitor, dr. john nagl, lieutenant colonel nagl, for his comments as well. you know, i think the deepness of the discussion back and forth shows that these are two guys that are very committed to our country's security, to our robust standing in the world, but that also that taking the can country to war is the most consequential decision that a command in chief and his congress need to make. and so we thank both of them for their contribution. now, i'd ask the audience to just sort of stay in place because what i'm going to do is to yield -- >> lock the doors. [laughter]

>> -- our senior fellow, dr. larry korp, who is going to take us in a different direction. and that is to the century foundation's report and looking at the prospects for negotiation and reconciliation. there's a very divisioned group here that's about to step in, so, dr. korb, if you'll take the podium, and we'll step off. we're actually going to be like a relay team and hand our mics off to the next group. thank you, audience, you've been very good, and we appreciate the questions. [applause] >> yeah. i'd like to begin by bringing jeff laurenti from the century foundation to give us an overview of the report and start this panel. jeff? >> thank you, larry. you have heard, now, for an hour and a half a discussion about the merits of counterinsurgency as a way of providing a fix to the problem in afghanistan.

when the new administration, then-new administration came into power two years ago and afghanistan seemed to be going to hell in a hand basket, the suggestion that counterinsurgency might be the way to repair the deteriorating relationships there really captivated many in washington, and it became almost a cottage industry among washington think tanks looking at counterinsurgency as a way militarily of fixing the situation. now, from century's kind of vantage point in new york, this seemed an unbalance of what had been done over the previous several years but not likely to result in a long-term peaceful afghanistan. and we embarked on a process with encouragement from the carnegie association in new york to think about how we could assemble an international group, a substantial american component

but also a major international component, given that it is foreign hands that for 30 years have been deeply involve inside creating and in propelling the direction of afghanistan's conflicts from the soviets to the pakistanis to the post-2001 afghanistan. and we recruited for this purpose two exceptional leaders, lakhdar bra himy special envoy in the late '90s and then again after the fall of the taliban regime and thomas pickering who has been undersecretary of state for political affairs in the united states and ambassador to any place that mattered, it seems, in terms of this conflict including the u.n., india and russia. and a brilliant cast of members, three of whom will be on our panel this afternoon, to look at how one would be able to find a

way towards a long-term peace in afghanistan. the report, and many of you may have picked up copies of this as you came in, basically looks at three questions, and they are played out in the chapters of this report. first, why bother to negotiate? which was a question that came up repeatedly in this first panel. second, what is there to negotiate? what would be on the ageneral defor -- agenda for negotiation both in terms of domestic conflicts and those international hands from outside that have been engaged in one way or another. and, third, how do you get a negotiating process under way? and the, these three questions, this international task force which included tokes from -- folks from both allied countries and some that are not quite so allied, most of the permanent members of the security council had citizens on this panel,

former russian foreign minister, former chinese representative to the u.n. as well as some of our european friends and people with deep u.n. experience. and the final report has generated a good deal of interest in all of these national capitals and in afghanistan on both sides. and we think that this discussion that we're about to have right now should be quite interesting. and enlightening, even, in terms of how we put afghanistan and the prospects for putting afghanistan through a negotiated settlement on to a long and steady course of peace and stability. so with that, larry, i will invite larry who will be moderating the interpanel discussion, and we'll be back to moderate your discussion with the members of the panel. larry. >> thank you, jeff. let me join everybody and

welcome you here to the center for american progress and, also, thank the century foundation not only for producing this report, but for asking me to be on the, on the task force. i've got to tell you it was one of the more enlightening experiences i've ever had, particularly traveling to to afghanistan with people from many other countries in the region. our panel today consists of three very distinguished people. first, ambassador vendrel, former e.u. special representative for afghanistan and, also, was the personal representative of the u.n. secretary-general to afghanistan. the ambassador, basically, was in iraq from 2000 until -- [laughter] the ambassador was there from 2000 to 2008. he's had -- if you look at all of the places the u.n. has tried to broker peace, you'll find that ambassador vendrell has

been in just about all of the places as a special representative of the secretary general. east timor, cambodia, new guinea and myanmar. and he's also been involved in the dealing with personal representative to the central american peace process pack in the '80s -- back in the '80s. that was an awfully big issue. the second member of our panel, dr. marvin weinbaum, who has had, basically, careers. he's been a professor, he's worked in the state department in the bureau of intelligence and research, and now he's a scholar in residence at the middle east institute here in washington. the author of many, many books and hundreds of articles dealing with part of the world. our final panel is steve coll a

contributor at the new york magazine. he spent 20 years at "the washington post" where he was a correspondent, senior editor and managing editor. he's also the author of a number of books, two of which have won pulitzer prizes and, of course, probably the most well known is "ghost wars: the secret history of cia, afghanistan and bin laden from soviet invasion to september 10, 2001." and he followed that up in 2008. so if i could ask my fellow panelists to come up here, and we'll begin the discussion. [laughter] >> the toughest part of getting a negotiation going.

okay, what i want to do is i'm going to ask each of the panelists to spend five or six minutes in the beginning responding to the question and covering the points that jeff raised. our negotiations -- are negotiations possible? is now the time to do it? who should be involved, and what are the chances for success? so let me begin with you, ambassador vendrell. if you would address those points, i'd appreciate it. no, from there. no, right here. [laughter] >> well, what the report is proposing is not necessarily that there should be immediate negotiations with the taliban. what we are proposing is that immediately, as soon as possible, there should be an exploratory envoy who would go to the region, talk to the

various afghan parties, and by the various afghan parties i mean the taliban and also the various taliban groups, but also talk to civil society and talk to parliamentarians in afghanistan and, also, should explore with the neighbors -- particularly pakistan and then iran, india, probably also others like russia -- how could talks with the taliban and the association with the taliban, how could they be structured? and whether there is some element of a political will to reach a political understanding, a political settlement. so we don't know at this point yet whether the taliban, for example, are willing to talk. they at times give private shalls that they seem to be -- signals that they seem to be

willing, but we don't really know. in public, probably taking the most appropriate line, they say, no, we don't want to talk. i say the most appropriate line because traditionally you negotiate under the table claiming you don't want to talk. and we have done the opposite. we have been saying we want to talk without actually talking. so not surprising that they are saying no. but we don't know. are they under pressure. >> or are they not? but the reasons why we this should start immediately is from my point of view at least counterinsurgency is not working. jeff mentioned that counterinsurgency was the name of the game. quite honestly, i don't think so. i think it's counterterrorism. if it is counterinsurgency, it's obviously not working because counterinsurgency has two sides. there's a military side, but it has, also, a political side in

terms of having a government worth defending, a government that brings about the rule of law and who, who has improved governance, who is less corrupt than it is now, and this hasn't happened. so i don't see a counterinsurgency policy working. and, therefore, we are saying a military solution by itself isn't going to work and, therefore, what we need is to see if there is a possibility of reaching a political settlement. because the alternatives are actually worse. the alternatives are that we have a deadline more or less of 2014, we -- the current military approach in afghanistan appears to be to kill as many mid-level taliban commanders as possible, but there are many people who are worried that this approach will only lead to a more

fragmented taliban led by younger people who may be even less willing than the taliban at the moment is or appears to be to reach a settlement and who may resist any political agreement that the elders might eventually arrive at. so we think that this needs to happen now. now, there are many interests, many countries and people who may be in favor of the status quo. civil society in afghanistan for a very good reason are afraid of negotiations that might lead to a reversal of the gains achieved over the past nine years. and to that we are saying, no, talking does not necessarily mean that you're going to accept all the taliban demands. and i would hope and i feel it is the hope of the office of

this -- the authors of this document that western countries would be supporting afghan demands, afghan men and women demands that the political gains achieved over the past ten years in terms of human rights, in terms of political freedoms and in terms of women's rights would be preserved. so we're not -- but they are worried, and they are worried about that we might suddenly pull out and leave them there. but then there are all kinds of other interests who are far less respectable. ..

>> to then step in. so, what we are simply saying is what we need to do as soon as possible is to start a process to find out where all these areas elements stand, and how could, if there is enough, enough political base, how could negotiations be conducted. >> thank you. so marvin, start friday, start negotiating? >> actually all of us would like -- negotiations leading to a political certainly. the afghans have been in a state

of conflict for 33 years. what's interesting to point out that the previous 40 had been used of political stability. as i see it, let me begin by saying this. i believe that what we have here today, despite all of the talk about negotiations that might get started, secret talks that are being conducted, my bottom line here is that the prospects for genuine serious -- excuse me -- top levels of negotiation to end the war are very dim. obviously negotiations are not an end in themselves. we have enough current examples of negotiation going on between india and pakistan over kashmir or the israelis and the palestinians on a two-state solution. to prove the point that just giving to the negotiations is not what it's about.

and in those two cases, the ingredients of an in state solution are really in fight. guided to blame can be said for afghanistan. a negotiated end to the conflict usually comes about when one party or the other seems destined to win, or has lost its will to fight. then the weaker party gets what it can get. another condition is where there is a stalemate, and both parties reach some sort of a compromise, usually pleases neither, and then we have the koreas. northern ireland probably falls somewhere in between. in any case, success negotiation took place, not over weeks or months, but years.

you can get a mower, quicker solution, of course, when one party surrenders in effect and unilaterally turned over. again, i don't believe that any of those conditions applied in afghanistan today. the century foundation report, and i was not a member of, those who were involved in writing the report, i think it's premised on the notion that there is already a stalemate or in your stalemate. there are others who want to see negotiations move quickly, now who believe it is necessary because we have already lost. i don't believe that reflects the reality of what is on the ground today. i'm afraid that in the desperation of many in this country, and in europe, to find a way out we convinced ourselves that if we show enough dedication to finding a solution, that the right

mechanisms will somehow get the talks on the way and good things will come. what is supposed to facilitate this in many of the plans is a commitment that says to a smaller military footprint. however much the taliban leadership is evolves talks, a growing number in this country, especially of columnist, bloggers, think tank, pundits and also diplomats refused to take no for an answer. instead point to the signs or some interests. nearly all the people that they base their conclusion on had once been associate with the taliban. and the truth is that when they did, they were not people of great influence. they were not part of the kandahar shura. i recall in the state department our negotiations with the former foreign minister who was one of those interlocutors now, and

when we tried to get him come and, sorry, the qatar shura who have come to some agreement on the yielding of osama bin laden. many of those pushing hard for it to clock him i believe are using the western concepts of political sentiment where what you do is you trade ministerial positions, a provincial appointment and constitutional revisions. the taliban have long indicated that sustain for the constitutional system and for the current leadership. they do not practice collision. andy and i submit they are true believers. at least the top leadership. therefore they have limited political ideological ambitions. and that these will, when they

prevail, he demonstrated. but the taliban has always stressed from the very beginning that it's an islamic movement, that transcends ethnic divisions. by the late 1990s they had made the transformation from those simply wanting, to liberate afghanistan to islamic militants committed to a higher cause. no one really expected the taliban will lay down their arms in agreement. why then should we expect that they will disown al qaeda? they have had more than a decade in which to do just that. and they don't particularly like their arab allies, they never liked them, but that has not led to any distance between the two. interestingly, the taliban has in a way stuck to its principles. they could be doing far more now, and it surprises me that they are not.

a grand bargain is achievable and have talks that drag a. it would certainly add to the confusion for many afghans and others of whether they are effectively the enemy or negotiating partners. with everyone else saying that this cannot be a military solution, it may be that the taliban are the only ones who still believe in war. for the taliban leadership, the urgency of finding a political solution is a surefire sign that we recognize that we are losing. and are preparing to leave and there's no reason to even pretend to compromise. the simple fact is the taliban leadership in pakistan believes that it is winning. this winter and spring in kandahar and helmand, but this is never discourage them in the past. we now know when we applied sanctions before 9/11 that the war we squeeze the leaders, the

more we felt their faith was being challenged. our early negotiations with the kandahar shura found them be leaving that time and god were on their side. and you don't certainly compromise with god. i believe that karzai is sincere in wanting peace like most others. certainly he would like to see them into the fighting and enhancing his own reputation. at a time that he really believes in a deal. he's too clever not to understand that he's not likely to survive any real power sharing. his high peace council is window dressing to keep the ethnic minorities, the other ethnic groups from thinking that he's going to strike a deal behind their backs. karzai endgame is that by adhering to be the peacemaker, and at the same time holding onto his loyalists he puts

himself in the best position to survive once the international community deserts him, or pushes him out, and he believes both of those. the united states at the same time can ill afford to stand in the way of automatic process. we've been hearing about. lesson being being accused of the spoiler. now, we can't have, we can't have a long-term relationship, military relationship bases or anything which smacks of a strategic relationship and have reconciliation at the same time. it is one or the other. all this said, looking for political solutions is what we should be doing. but notice that i use the plural. negotiations must be pursued i believe at a tactical level rather than at a strategic level. that's with local agreement and integration. it's not -- involved emigration.

that's not a grand bargain for the haqqani network. it is with the middle and lower level taliban. the causes of the insurgency and its being sustained our local. and so are the solutions. until now the discussions about one that might go into negotiations have been the terms of elite to delete. not reflecting the interests of civil society and the public at large. any success politically as likely to come village by village, militia by militia, but only in the event that there are military gains that people believe him. we are not them. negotiations are not a substitute. and military -- when mentioned, are unsustainable without improvement in people's lives, services, and their freedom from

predatory and abusive government. they are access to better government and above all, the rule of law. in conclusion, i don't know if this is still possible. the odds against stabilizing the country much less defeating insurgency are long ones. we got a late start. with our enemy, and right now we sometimes are our own worst enemy with our policies. it is a rotten government that karzai leads. there will be difficulties building an afghan security force, sanctuary in pakistan makes it all the more difficult. may be impossible. at the same time, the consequences of failure in meeting our objectives which involve global terrorism, regional stability, those are objectives and the consequences of not meeting them, i think,

are rather, are rather frightening. let's not fool ourselves into believing that there are very -- or any current plan b's out there that are benign. the best we can hope for at this moment at least is coming close to realizing our objectives with the insurgency, a counter insurgency. we need to give it every opportunity to prove itself. that doesn't mean indefinitely. i fear that we are likely to lose the war here before we lose it in afghanistan. >> thank you, mark. steve, you were the first one to break the story about negotiations going on since you broke in all kinds of things. we have pakistanis going over to afghanistan, talk about a common front. we've seen afghan officials

confirmed these talks are going on. are they still going on? are they serious? is this the way we ought to be going? >> i think they are still going on. they haven't delivered yet a framework for substantive negotiations, and they may never. i don't think either side knows in the end whether the vision of offshore formal negotiations that would include the taliban having, for example, a political office that was protected by agreement of negotiating powers, for example, representatives can turn up and speak in some sense for the taliban leadership. whether that is going to come together or not. i know there is an in tension more this year than in any previous year since 9/11 to try to construct such a negotiation. but my impression is that it talks about talks have almost reached the point that you

remember from your eighth grade dance, you know where there's like two groups of people along the wall talking to each other about what might happen. and then somebody looks at the watch an old evening is over. nothing has quite happen. so i'm not sure whether, what into to your question is. but i would just try to add to the two could, and quite different, framing remarks that we heard so far by coming at from a third perspective. i think rather than passing confident judgment, i respect the two different judgments we've heard on whether or not counter insurgency, per se, is going to succeed, whether it is fitting, what it needs more time. i would just start with a different way of attacking the same question, which is that in the counterinsurgency field manual it is a fundamental premise that any practitioner or

tourist of counterinsurgency worldwide would know, that 80% of the intended affect our political. so that's the nature of counterinsurgency. it is meant to be a political doctrine. so the question in afghanistan is what is the nature of the politics that would bring counterinsurgency towards success, however you define success? and i think the art in an afghan, rather than talk about abstractly, i think any afghan context there are a couple of models to think about. one is the model that i believe the command certainly has great direct experience with, which is a model transported out of iraq and out of the surge in iraq, and now tries in an adaptive way being laid down in afghan conditions. in that model politics is as marvin argued for, local and it is based on militia-based security, local police. and whether our negotiations

with the enemy, they are done at the unit level under the rubric now in the american jargon of reintegration. is sometimes confusing i think even for think take tank attendees could establish between reintegration and reconciliation but they are intended to describe two different kinds of negotiating with the enemy. reintegration is a process similar to ddr programs and after were you being particular armed groups into particular local disarmament settings, convert them into other jobs, trained them, upright of methods. and and reconciliation refers to strategic negotiations with any leadership. those two processes are not mutually exclusive, in principle. and in african settings, for example, they are often going on simultaneously. in this case the model that's been emphasized coming out of iraq has excluded strategic negotiations. in part because they didn't go on in iraq. we did negotiate with iran about the future of sadr's status in

iraqi politics. for obvious reasons. so there is a mindset that emphasizes local militias and reintegration as the best form of politics, to carry a counter insurgency's premise that most of the successful effects of counterinsurgency are delivered. now, i have doubts about how well that applies in an afghan setting. i won't dwell on them but i just mentioned the idea that an approach to security in afghanistan after three years of militia violence, that is premised on the creation of more to local militia, just kind of begs a little bit skepticism. the second model that i think is worth considering, in which i do think is more century foundations work, in which they do think is also still under consideration by central command and i certainly others in the obama administration is the

model suggested by the soviet exit strategy which essentially tried to blend the reintegrati reintegration, local militias, defections, with a kind of balance of regional diplomacy, the geneva accords being region deposed on steroids. and some strategic negotiations with sections of the enemy. in the context of the regional diplomatic effort. now, this is not 1989 and it's not 1999. this is afghanistan after 10 years of very heavy international involvement. very heavy outside capital flows. extremely complicated sets of distortions inside the political economy. so none of these models really is adequate, you know, in a box. but i do think that the idea

strategic negotiations integrated with other politics is a better way to approach question than just to consider it an isolation. i guess that's the point i want to make on that. now, is there any. a basis to justify the pursuit of negotiations with talibans unit leadership? marvin says no. i want to offer evidence on the other side. first of all what do we mean when we talk about the taliban? they are fragmented. we are not talking about the islamic him right anymore. we're talking about an organization that includes teaching leadership that is mostly present in an entity that we best understand of the sure that is of itself not exactly a transparent or well-established organization. then they're our allies to which some of them substantial important like the haqqani network, others less substantial and less important but still under arms like others.

and then there are local militias under commanders in the field who may be appointed and have allegiance to assure. but there are -- command-and-control is buried in questionable. so, if you ask then in the next who is it that would be susceptible to turning up at the uae clinical office or an anchor or a stable political office, we are talking about the graying generation. some of the ministers doubtless of the quetta shura who have been signaling. now, would ask to come forward? i agree it's unknown. now, why would they be interested? one is a generational divide. they are not at that time of life where driving and land cruisers, you know, into kandahar and having an 80% likelihood of being struck by a

hellfire missile in the next 30 minutes, not as it did at 50 as it was at 45. and i think it is clearly as you see often in these kinds of insurgencies, one grouping of generational leadership that is interested in another way of doing things. there's also 10 years since 2001 of pakistani coercion that has clearly animated sections of the older generation that is stuck in pakistan, dependent on isi for passports, depend on pakistani tolerance for the license to run a stop around the corner, to rent a home. everything about the life and now they have children and their cousins and brothers, and everybody is subjected to pakistani permissions. and afghans as a windows is fiercely refined and especially the taliban having been in power for some years would wish to restore their own independence. and i would say also, it's

important to take note that while they have -- they were not very significant. reconciliation has already occurred. sections came in under the ambassadorship. they are now sitting in kabul. they were the sort of targets of opportunity that you in seen in 2004, 2005. but the model of successful reconciliation is already established in a number of significant cases. other undeclared but nonetheless reconcile taliban already make up part of the body politics in the army of afghan. people change sides in the fall 2001 without necessarily advertising it, ambassadors. and then finally, the quetta shura does communicate and successfully negotiate already in afghanistan. humanitarian aid is negotiated

routinely in afghanistan. my impression from talking to the humanitarian who rely on direct exchange with taliban leadership about access to particular territory is that the quetta shura can deliver its promises about 80% of the time. i'm not sure i want to drive the jeep under those odds but that's essentially an indication that this is not a fantasy, that they can deliver even in areas where they're dealing with young commanders. now, why would you take these risks? marvin said very provocatively negotiations are not an end result. i agree with it. i do think though there is an objective that is achievable even to partially successful fragmentary negotiations, for example, the surrounded par four for years. -- darr for. broke off action hud accepted --

by reducing violence they created a permissive space for other kinds of politics, and for traditional counterinsurgency affects. so the objective would be to reduce violence and then to use that violence to extend the sources of other successful political and military strategy. now, i would just and then by stepping out of the case for trying this, and emphasized that if these are political traps from other political solutions, they are i agree very much with what mark was saying at the end, that negotiations cannot be seen as a political strategy. they had to be seen as one element of a much broader and more determined and more resilient clinical strategy, in general it would be in the interest of international community and asking us to migrate energy and investments from of military operations toward political operations for the purpose of securing afghan unity and stability for the

purpose of reducing the direct rule, the unsustainable role now played by international forces. those other political tracks are probably looking out over three or four years more important than the strategic negotiations that i am nonetheless defended. i which is quickly pick them off, it would include transition beyond president karzai's term successfully, the prevention of his usurping the constitution term limits that now confronting most of the afghan opposition was afraid he was going to rig the parliamentary elections and delayed the seating of parliament for the purpose of securing permission to extend his rule. now they fear something else, which is the use of politics and current extraconstitutional negotiations and processes as an end run around the electoral process and transition. it would be a tragedy if the

attempt to negotiate at any level, even reintegration, created space for the president to run around the constitution. parliament and with the international community's rare unified and successful support was needed, was defended, now is a flawed but independent basis for clinical activity in afghanistan and must be permitted to advance, and protected. and i think those kinds of prophecies, which also require international diplomacy, regional diplomacy, and direct negotiations among afghans and supporters have to be understood as the more important track in which these other kinds of negotiations with the taliban should be seen. >> thank you, steve. francesc, you had a great opening statement. let me ask you to follow up and deal with some of the points

they raise. and in particular the question is it will end up like kashmir for example, or somebody negotiating from a position of weakness? is it can only be done on the local level? i mean, basically how to respond to the objection particularly raised by marvin? >> well, first of all, talking and fighting are not incompatible. and in many situations, and the report doesn't suggest otherwise, one can continue the military operations, both sides, i'm sure the taliban would want to do the same. at the same time talking and trying to find an agreement. second, the kashmir example is, i'm sorry to say, a very bad one. in fact, indians in pakistan have not been talking on kashmir. have been talking about each other. and there's been no sensitive by the international community to

push the two sides towards a meaningful discussion and agreement. to some degree you can argue it's a failed process, not because they're talking. because they're really not talking. and again, of course i entirely agree that talking is not for the fun of talking. it is to -- i cannot suggest know what kind of settlement will be agreed. i would hope that we would all be working to assure that, i repeat, the gains achieved over the past 10 years are on pace. so i also, when you talk about talibans while they were in power, quite different situation. i mean, i was an envoy to them between 2002001. yes, the sanctions did not have an impact because they were in power.

now, we are now talking of a situation where they are under severe attack, military attack, where they are being squeezed by the pakistani, and where i would imagine that there believe in being able to start all over again in 1996 essentially, but i repeat, and one final point. i'm very sorry that a couple of years ago the term reconciliation came in. reconciliation is a misused term for what we at times say in afghanistan. reconciliation as used in afghanistan means talks with the taliban. if you like negotiations with the taliban. reconciliation traditionally happens after the peace agreement, and there is reconciliation at the lower level. so what we are now talking is,

is talks at the high level. now, i don't believe that it is going to be feasible to have talks at the local level, as you suggest. that will deliver serious results. it will lead to an -- of afghanistan, and we would have an enormous number of militias in a group which may continue the fight on the ground even if it is a political settlement. >> let me follow that up. of all of us here you know president karzai the best. do you agree with what marvin characterization of him, what is he really concerned about? >> you know, i've known president karzai since before he became president. and i have had, used to have, i still have a great deal of respect. now, he was pushed into that position. he was put in that position

because the international community having decided to -- needed a figurehead to a pashtun figurehead. now, after he was appointed, he was not supported in the way that he deserved. the u.s. in particular, but to some degree also the europeans and the u.n., basically said to him, you have to deal with the warlords. we made no attempt to disarm or disband the warlords. the very people who have brought we went to afghanistan before the taliban took over. and slowly he has adapted to the situation in which he is dealing with some very nasty characters. now, i think we don't need to go back to know that power corrupts, and i think there has been an element of corruption, not so much in him but in terms of his family. and the danger is that both he and the person who is not

mentioned but is very much a power broker, marshall, who is a top warlord and probably someone who committed a series war crimes or crimes against humanity, is now his right hand man. and this has become the families of the two, have become a kind of signature which is going to be much more difficult to remove to some degree. that's a much because president karzai himself wants to stay in power but because he wants to protect the business interest and interest acquired by the two families. >> steve, you know a lot about the taliban. do you agree with what marvin said about the taliban really would like to bring al qaeda or they would basically act the same way they did before 9/11, given what's happened in the past decade? >> well, i agree that there is no evidence that the taliban has ever made a hard decision to repeat al qaeda. and if that opportunity.

it had incentive. there's been a number of occasions when some taliban actually, as you here the accounts of internal discussio discussions, some taliban have openly argued it's in our interest to comply. but omar has never sanctioned such decision and there's never been a coalition within the quetta shura that has been willing to take that decision. now, you can argue about why that is. we don't really have great evidence about the integral discourse. the fragments of it, what marvin says are certainly very compelling accounts of omar at various points saying i have the answer to a journey and i'm simply not going to betray someone or an organization i believe is right just for the sake of non-muslims. but there are also more sort of realist arguments that get forced into this pixel essentially it is an untested proposition as to the current setting, but there's a historical basis to be skeptical

about omar in particular. that leads you to the few that i think is current in the obama administration, was cut last year, last time i knew, that you almost have to find an extra mullah omar strategy if you want to have any hope of breaking off sections of the quetta shura and can actually exploit the indication, the clear indication that they're providing in interest of negotiations under certain circumstances. you're going to have -- mullah omar, separate mullah omar from the separation in theory, you know, shouldn't be impossible since he is not really as i understand very much present with the shura from meeting to meeting any a. exactly his status is, you know, is a mystery. but i do think that if you're asking the question about what their conduct in the period from 1998 until, you know, 2002

suggests, that was an era where mullah omar's decision-making was much more central than what is hypothesized. we could go on here. >> marvin, if you take a couple of minutes and respond to what you want here, but also addressed the point that has been raised about maybe a soviet exit strategy exit strategy type of deal. does that fit in at all with some of the things you thought about rather than sort of kashmir and israel-palestine? >> well, i think the evidence is that how ever important he is, and certainly not day to day operations, talking about mullah omar, nevertheless, all of the elements do pay homage to him. and that continues to be the case. he still is a man who commands great respect, not only among the core elements of the taliban, but even with the pakistani taliban.

so, and certainly with the haqqani family. but again, we don't know. i think the problem here with this divorcing the two is that if they were to come in with a pledged -- a pledge that they would distance themselves from al qaeda because al qaeda under those conditions is not going to go away necessarily, first question you ask is why should we believe them. maybe this is a tactical device to get their kind of settlement. but let's assume now that they are sincere, and let me introduce an element which we haven't discussed. and that is, what probably would be the showstopper for various kinds of reconciliation, and that is the northern, northern. they made it very clear here

that they are very suspicious of any kind of negotiation. and that indeed they are prepared to fight if necessary. certainly the hazara group which has the kind of blood feud with the taliban would be most likely to do so. my point here is that we haven't spoken about the possibility, the very real possibility because they're heavily armed, of a civil war. and in that context whatever might be agreed to by any parties here could very well be put in advance at least while this war goes on. and i think once we get into that, probably whatever agreement was reached would be largely null and void. when the taliban find themselves conceivably involved in a proxy war which will involve iran and russia and its clients, and india very likely will be

involved as well, in that kind of setting, can you imagine mullah omar who is rather say no to the radical islamic community, be it lashkar-e-taiba, jihadi groups, or any, including, including osama bin laden, can you imagine saying no, i made a pledge here that i wasn't going to depend on you. that seems to me foolish, because at that point in time in the conditions of what he is involved in the civil war he will be looking for whatever support he can get from any source he can get it from. >> can i say one thing? >> quickly. >> just on the mullah omar subject, under the bob woodward

ruled that if you talk to a journalist off the record and then you pass on the ground rules come off, i would say it that i had lunch with ambassador holbrooke last year. and he said in the course of discussing this very subject, if i could kill either osama bin laden or mullah omar at this stage i think it would be more productive to kill mullah omar. >> okay. i'm not happy -- that was a very -- [talking over each other] >> i would disagree with them. i think that mullah omar despite everything one thinks and knows about him, is, can be -- probably no one else could. and second, on the issue of taliban and al qaeda, i have no

idea as to the reply, but one thing i know, if i were taliban and wanted to break with al qaeda, i wouldn't discard in advance. there are two cards the taliban will hold in any talks. one would be the fact that they're fighting. and two, they leak to al qaeda. you don't take that out until there is a settlement. >> okay. jeff, we're not going to turn over to questions. jeff will moderate a. and please come in your question make it short, as quickly as you can. we would like to give everybody a chance to get into and also identify yourself and ask the person that you would like to answer the question. >> groups in three questions for the panel can pick and choose how to reply. first i will abuse the prerogative of the moderator, the q&a by posing -- >> one question. >> the core goal for the

insurgency is the eviction of all foreign forces. and without that, no deal. and even these taliban foot soldiers who go and we're the fight and had to be reintegrate sa what motivate them was to get those foreigners out, and they still want to see those foreigners out. so the question is, is washington ready to pull all of its troops out as part of a deal? or are washington's allies in afghanistan were to contemplate it. and to what extent does what goes on with regard to the american presence in iraq or pledge to pull out by the end of the year, factor into afghans see the reliability of an american guarantee withdrawal? to question number one gives with the withdrawal of u.s. troops as part of the deal. and questions next? yes. >> and please identify yourself. >> off expect from a?

>> independent tv producer. i wonder if by all afghanistan and pakistan middle east, and all this fight and no timeline really, or potentially it can stay forever. and what they are saying i really don't understand the nation, first of all, what is real purpose. and second is if you are talking corruption, you are always named other countries have the corruption officials, military, but there's corruption right here in the united states as you can see. they can have -- [inaudible] that doesn't seem right. >> thank you. so what's the real mission purpose and the question of corruption not being just afghan but also -- [inaudible] >> i we promoting democracy when we don't have democracy your?

>> thank you. and right behind you. >> i apologize to those who are still in him. i asked this question to the previous panel. >> you want to stand at? >> i'm sorry, i'm tethered here. i'm with npr and i would like to ask the panelists to you talk with this kind of influence of the pakistani government over the taliban in pakistan. in light of that russia pakistan's role be in any negotiated settlement, if any? thank you. >> so shall we start on these three questions? real mission and corruption and pakistani role. francesc, why don't you -- start with you. >> i think that one is simply trying to find out if there are enough, if there is enough, enough conditions to start

talking. or even when one is talking. i don't think it's impossible at the same time to be having discussions with the afghan government about this region partnership. for as long as it is clear that this is something that would happen if talks with the taliban were to fail, in other words, this is not a commitment to stay put or to have permanent bases that this is something that would have to occur if there was no peace settlement reached. so it's a slightly different thing. on corruption, the importance is not what we think about corruption in afghanistan. the important thing is what the afghans feel it and afghans feel, calls -- although their use to crack in the past they feel the level of corruption and cheese at the moment is in tolerable. and this is -- be legit fashion

what we're saying in the report is we need to have been deeply involved. they're going to be an important part of any talk in the negotiations. they will have, it is a essential they bite into the talks and into the final outcome, but at the same time talks must not be done through the. it is the way we approach the taliban. >> on that last point, it would be a path to failure if we allow the pakistanis to negotiation on behalf of the taliban. and that failure would include the failure to realize pakistan's legitimate interests of a stable politically durable afghan settlement. and one reason is because taliban leaders at every level

where they've been able to talk about this issue in some kind of independent way and the size that their own credibility as negotiators, as people capable of making a bargain and holding to it with other afghans, is instantly undermined if their afghan counterparts see them merely as instrument of pakistani strategy. they have suffered under that structure and label for a long time. >> marvin? >> i think we all agree that pakistan has to be at least involved if there were negotiations. but i also think we have to recognize that there are at least some of pakistan's interest here, which are not compatible with u.s. interests and interests of nato at this point. and those will be a factor.

the pakistanis, interestingly come to recognize, i think it has to be seen as part of this, that they don't trust the taliban. we assume, we often simply put them together, they are their protectors and, therefore, a question jeff of whether they're speaking for them or if they have coordinated their efforts, and then pakistan's have reason to be suspicious that they can control the taliban and power. what the pakistanis want out of negotiations is they want a pushtan enforce in kabul that they don't want it to have a free hand. they want to have that force in a way checked, or deluded, by the other groups. and in that way they can be sure that their basic interests are taken care of, and that includes of course a downgrading of the

indian influence in afghanistan. and at the same time they will not have to think what could be that blowback if the talibans work again great ascendance there where they might come and i believe they would, then find that their interest really are far more akin to those of the pakistani talibans. and that would have enormous effect on the stability in pakistan. >> let me pick up your point about iraq because i think it kind of got lost. one of the reasons with such a problem in afghanistan is we took our eye off the ball and focused on iraq, did not come through with the aid and everything that we promised. if, in fact, we try and stay in iraq it will undermine the negotiations begin in pakistan. i agree, i been in afghanistan. i agree you should not give it away right at the beginning. but if you send a signal that you don't keep that agreement, particularly when there are people in iran, i mean in iraq who don't want you there, i

think it's going to have an impact on the negotiations but i don't think anyone is focused on it at this time. >> thank you. very. >> the gentleman in the fourth row. red suspenders. spent my name is joseph. i'm a private citizen from chicago. my question regards the much applauded and now never heard about northern alliance. they're armed, i assume they're armed. what is the role in any fighting come any conflict with the talibans? and also, has there been any good effort for good success in creating the afghans figured he forces with a larger pashtun element to them? >> okay. than in the front row here, please. >> my name is dan caldwell, i'm a professor at pepperdine university. i would like to ask what the

biggest surprise is to you were as a result of your service on this century foundation commission. >> and all the way in the back. >> one question i have is -- >> your name? >> till goodfellow. what incentive does karzai inter- circle have to negotiate, to better deal, a deal that ultimately would leave, have the americans leaving. they're getting extremely rich. dexter filkins piece on the kabul bank heist. it's a staggering amount of money these guys are stealing. and just creates an enormous incentive it seems to me to keep going. and the last thing they want is the americans to wind down the war because the gravy train stops. how do we change that dynamic? >> thank you. why don't we start with mary and work towards francesc.

>> on the biggest surprise was the dysfunction of the american team. every place we went we got, you know, you know, i can -- eichinger doesn't go along and dick holbrooke was to live and we wish that mcchrystal was back. in other words, it just looked like we did not have a common position over there. i mean, you heard about but when you hear it, just members of the parliament, from members of the opposition, from everybody else, that was not only surprising but disheartening. >> i'll talk about the northern alliance. first of all, it's not that much of an alliance. it's a term which is carried over from the time when they were fighting the taliban. if you look at its composition

here you would find that most of the element of the allies, many of the projects and certainly hazara as i mentioned earlier, they're heavily armed at this point. some of the groups have played a large role in the afghan national army. and in the event of a civil war, the army will really break up. and large portions of it will become a fighting force for what will be if we wish to call it the northern alliance. but i don't hold out much hope for it because it is lacking one important element, and that is it doesn't have the leader. certainly the general who was the successor, who was the leader in the 1990s, he is dead now.

in no way commands allegiance of the other element. and, in fact, i wouldn't even trust him in the civil war. but ultimately because it is a fraction group, my guess is that eventually the taliban could prevail and complete the job that they failed to do in the late 90s and up until 9/11. so let me add, in the interim we will have ethnic cleansing. we will have a very bloody affair, something that we have talked about, will have 2 million refugees who will be making a beeline for pakistan which is ill-equipped to absorb any afghan refugee at this point. >> steve. >> well, i certainly worry about the unbalancing fx of the

transition and even of the negotiations with the taliban because the civil war a certain something that afghans themselves worry about for good reason given their recent experience with the. i don't think it is likely. i don't, i do agree that the northern alliance what we used to call the northern alliance is fractured, divided. in fact, it has been more or less co-opted by the present and other elements of his alliance stand in political opposition to the presidential palace. the army is the most important way to measure this question, and i do think that there's a lot of hedging on and a lot of new stuff international investment in the ana to try to prepare against the possibility of being back in a civil conflict. the recruitment of pashtuns into the officer corps, especially the general officer corps is a

concern for those leaders of northern groups that are thinking about the possibility of having to fight another civil war against the taliban serving again as a proxy group for the pakistan army. and that is they don't want to build a two into the army in advance of such a conflict so they will be very cautious about which pashtun officers they allow to rise up inside the army and to build controlled networks among officers. i think that doesn't mean no posh district if you're them you want the broadest possible front to defend against a second or against pakistan is issued which would be one way to thing. they will have partners in the war and it will be much better resource than was in the 1990s and more committed. russia and iran will be supportive. they have strategic depth that they didn't have in the 1990s. they also have a body of politics include a young generation of afghans that are going to resist the taliban in such a setting.

they can build out a broader coalition if they are a band to fight the were. but it does require caution about building in officers from helmand and kandahar and other places where they would imagine they will have trouble monitoring the loyalty. >> i don't think we have, i mean, in terms of the northern alliance, i think preconditioned in my view to having and eventual settlement in afghanistan, it requires the building up of a political consensus amongst the afghan political class as to what are the objectives and talking to the taliban, what would be the outcome, what would be the red lights? we saw that. it is going to be much too difficult. so in this period while perhaps special envoy is trying to work out the mechanics, that should be a parallel effort led by the

u.n. in afghanistan, led by ngos, led by whoever to build up a consensus. at the moment it does not exist. just as we also leave and build, we need to ensure that at one point, the afghan government and the u.s. government speak with the same, from the same when they are dressing the issue of talking to the taliban. i think the way to persuade the government of afghanistan at the end of the day, someone suggested here, was not terribly interested in reaching an agreement with the taliban. one thing is talking, another one is talking about talking. another is to actually agree to a settlement. but i think that enough ways as we have seen now, enough ways for the u.s. and for the europeans to say to president karzai, you will be on your own

bike, i don't like it, but i think he needs to deal that there is, that this is a position that will happen. particularly if there are no reforms within the afghan government. >> one last round of questions. >> oh, and for my surprise was to find that we so easily reached agreement on the conclusions of the report, despite our nature. >> let me just follow up with one question to the suggestion that you could see a splitting inside the forces of the afghan state right now, and some who would from the northern alliance going up, who would be bankrolling? right now we are bankrolling that afghan army far beyond afghanistan's ability to pay.

where would a kind of rebel, you know, force that is not trying to conceive anything to the taliban get its funding? >> i don't think it will get that far. you would have this break up long before you actually got a formal agreement. they would wait that long. so as far as funding for the northerners, i think that's very clear. all of the other parties are prepared to fund them. exactly what is going to take him if that's what it's going to take to keep and to send taliban from emerging. i would anticipate a much larger role on india's part, even perhaps put in military advisers. now, as i say the fragmentation of this ultimately is going to make, make this still an uphill climb for the northern alliance.

but i don't suspect that money is going to be the object here. >> well, i would just point out that are task force in india did export precisely those questions. and grudgingly, reluctantly they recognize, they seemed to recognize that if the choice is a settlement in which they get some guarantees against talibans control, versus renewable of war in which they're trying to support the anti-taliban trusting all too the most fickle god, that the form is a better course. on all sides to end this war. so want to thank you very much for your participation in this program come and thank you to the panel. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you will hear about his decision-making during 9/11 and his strategy on the wars in iraq and afghanistan. >> we talked about what all the things that can go bad. and one of them was we may not find weapons of mass destruction. i mean it was right there written, sent around to the members, sent to the president.

we thought about those things. i was a program with o'reilly not too long ago and he can't think why didn't you tell us, why didn't you tell us the things that might go wrong? and i said a wonderful idea. let's kill the anything every conceivable thing we might have a problem with so that they can get about doing it. no. that's not the kind of thing that you tell the press or talk about in public but there's a list of, i don't know, page after page of things that duncan of the people in the government thought about. we talked about and keep and dick and to circulate and people were worried about. >> watch this discussion from the hudson institute tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> tonight on c-span to a discussion on race in america. you hear from hip-hop and demand on chairmen will christen and form -- film director spike lee to talk about media coverage of minority's.

>> you can go to 10 tea party expressed off and get enough footage to make the case this is a racist organization? you think there isn't a time among those one or thousand people they say i don't care whether the birth of thing is true or not? you don't think you can capture that on tape? they don't care whether it is true or not. i think the news me on the birther issue should say that they didn't issue. anyone who brings it up is ridiculous. if you get a phone call and they say hey, do you support donald trump, your answer should be like no, he's an idiot. he is trying to sell me something. he is trying to hustle me out of my vote with a dead issue. no, i don't support him. >> watch this discussion from the aspen institute tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2.

>> on monday the ocean energy safety advisory committee held its first meeting here in

washington. interior department credit the committee earlier this year to provide guidance on improving offshore oil drilling practices. cherry murray a member of the presence commission investigate the deepwater horizon disaster talks about the finest of the commission and its recommendations. >> good morning, everyone. my name is brad from the designated federal officer for this committee.ce going to make some brief, some housekeeping announcements. first of honorng like to welcome you all for being here

we will call to order. if you have the cell phones, please put them on si or vibrate. for our committee members lyst, r committee members and palace, please make sure you were speaking in to the freestanding microphone and is flashing green. you signed and this morning and there should have been some comment, -- comment cards. please feel free to give us back -- give them back to us before you leave. if you do not have a chance to make a comment during the public comment portion, it begins at 4:30.

i'll turn it over to dr. tom hunter, the chairperson of the committee. >> thank you. i am going to begin by introducing the deputy secretary of the interior and he will give us [inaudible] >> thank you. thank you to all the views serving on this very important new committee. i want to thank you for your agreement to serve on this committee and to serve the department and the country. it is very appropriate, i think, that our first meeting of the committee comes just short of the first-year anniversary of the deepwater horizon blow all disaster -- blowout disaster. there has been an enormous amount of attention on the safety of offshore drilling practices and appropriately so.

we have had a searing experience with people out itself and its aftermath. i was the first administration official down in the gulf the morning after the blowout t, flying down that morning, on the phone with the command center. watching that night and the next day as a remotely operated vehicles -- new terms for america that we have become very acquainted with. since then, as you know, we engaged in a vigorous and disciplined reforma agenda, and new safety rules have been put into place, new requirements for cementing inspections for certification, new management

system requirements, a major reorganization and enforcement for a deepwater, new containment requirements. it is apparent throughout to that we need more and we need your help. help us define how to do more. the idea of this committee grew out of conversations that we had throughout the summer of 2010 with tom hunter, your chair, thad allen, and others. it became apparent as the struggle to get a deep water horizon situation under control and as we dealt of the -- with the aftermath of this bill that offshore drilling, research and development had lagged in all phases from the drilling safety requirements themselves to a containment.

and to oil spill response, where we watched skimmers and effectively dealing with the spill and scrambled to deal with a 21st century problem with the technology of the 20th, or a scene, the 19th century. the question that we talked about during many late nights was how we could we gather in one place the expertise needed to have this country lead when it comes to offshore drilling safety? we should have a center of excellence where industry, as it moves forward with expertise, does not leave behind the academic community, the ngo

community, our government. that is your basic charge, this advisory committee. how can you help us put together a center of excellence, something like the ocean energy safety institute, that will enable collaboration in real- time in these three important areas of drilling safety, containment, and of oil spill response? we need this, we have the opportunity to do this, and all of you have given your service to this effort to. i will warn you, having served alongside tom hunter in a number of capacities, you'll be working hard. tom hunter does not lead moscow under his face -- maas grow under his feet. that is why we are also excited that this public process is now

underway in. while we are proud of the reforms we have put in place, we note that more needs to be done and we look forward to your guidance as we move forward and the secretary will be here shortly after lunch to reinforce these messages. in the meantime, i look forward to the morning session and to his leadership. let me make one final comment. i want to thank some of the key folks who have helped put this together. including brad, whom you just heard from, it has been a huge organizer of this entire effort to. with the full support of mike, tommy, melissa, and the entire team. i would also like to thank ray, who has been a leader for my in this effort.

it was a tremendous effort to sift through the enormous numbers of nominations we received before the seeds around this table. congratulations to all of you are in d.c. it's because there was significant competition at. it was brad, brian, in particular, a porch with time to put this thing together. a special thanks to them. >> thank you, david. let me welcome everyone on the panel. [inaudible] those panelists who will be with us and will have a chance to talk to us. i want to echo some of david's remarks. they worked very hard. i could not help but notice today that we're within a couple of days of the anniversary of

the deepwater horizon. there is no question about the impact on the nation, an industry. it had a great impact on my life and my view of things. it really demonstrated something which i pondered about for a long time. the incredible and balance we have between -- imbalance between a secure energy and protecting the earth on which we live. i really think that is where a lot of the future may rest and i believe that it is important for us -- and might not coming through, brad? ok, sorry. the impact that it had on all of us, the great reality, this

question of balancing we did to preserve theiron >> the world needs a lot of energy, and somehow that seems to be unchangeable. the environment has taken a significant insult, incident rather, and that is a path on which the world may be that we may not be able to survive once we get there, but there is, i think, something about this event. it was unthinkable, but some people thought incredible. it was for some days there viewed to be unstoppable, and certainly in everyone's views completely unacceptable. i don't spend a lot of time on my introduction. i'll give you the chance to do yours. it's my privilege to serve the country of the national laboratories for the bulk of my career and the learning opportunities from the deepwater horizon left me with a lot of deep appreciation for the deep

expertise in the business of deepwater drilling. it is a role i think that allowed me to gain a deeper understanding, something that's so important to our country, but allowed me to meet people and have a profound impact on where it goes. it was a tragic cay tas trough fee. it's my view it could have been avoided and contained earlier. the impacts could have been reduced. now, the role and the goal of this committee is to bring ideas and actions together from industry government, nongovernment organizations, and universities to make those could have beens reality, that is to make it so we really do avoid such incidences in the future and lessen the impact in any way that we can. i'm pleased that you have agreed to serve on this committee. it's a distinguished group.

as david said, there was a lot of competition to be on this group. it's one with a diversity of views and perspectives and experiences that will allow us to accomplish a lot. it is, in fact, a committee. there's a lot of rules to follow, and brad, for example, will keep us straight on all the rules at all times. if there's any questions about that, please call it. we'll know each other in our role, and that's a large part of what today's meeting is about. we'll try to seek a better understanding of where the operations and technology for deepwater drilling really are today, and we'll look for ways on how to make recommendations on how to improve and enhance those. this morning, we have a series of speakers who will bring us up to speed on perspectives on what occurred in the last year or so and allow us to ask questions to get to a common level of understanding on those events. we'll be making recommendations and the discussion is about

scope and charter and about where we're going to move the committee, and we will also address what you just heard from david. we'll address what is the most effective way in which government, industry, universities and nongovernment organizations can work together and pull together, and how we can develop much better and safer environment for energy production from the waters of the world. today, we'll begin gathering such information. i would encourage you to ask questions and to bring your experience and your insight into those questions, and then try to participate in the discussion. it will be moderated as we go through. it is my real honor today though to introduce each of you which i will do with the following method. i'll ask you to introduce yourselves, but i'll start. joe, we'll start with you, and

mike, you're last because you introduced the panelists. starting with joe, and you'll have a minute or two to do that. in that introduction, state something about your role, current role and professionally, and then also to state something about your hopes and desires for the future of this committee, so, joe, we'll begin with you and end up, chris, with you. >> thank you, tom. as tom mentioned, i'm joseph gebara. i've been in the oil and gas industry for 17 years, joined the industry after finishing ph.d. from purdue university. my role currently at the manager of floater delivery, so my role is in the design and fabrication of floaters used mainly for production in the gulf of mexico as well as other parts of the world. my hopes from this committee is

that we work together like tom said to be able to achieve safer and environmentally sensitive way of producing oil and gas from the u.s. water. i think with that, i'll pass it on to tad. >> okay, tad? >> i'm tad patzek, chairman of the geosystems engineering department at the university of texas in austin. i worked as a civil engineer for about 30 years now. i started my career from shell in houston at the research center, then i joined for 18 years, and for the last two and a half years i've been teaching and chairing in austin. my background is in applied mathematics and physics more than anything else. i'm a civil engineer and geophysicist and i worked on the

energy supply systems and ecosystems and some of the dynamics of stainability of human race, and the results are not positive. my hope is that not only will we achieve that here, but we will also manage to keep public interests in this extremely important here of intersection of the highest rate energy supply for humanity and also high impact on the environmental systems. >> good morning, i'm mathy stanislaus, the u.s. administrator for epa and emergency response. i spent many months along with david dealing with the response including many weeks in the gulf with unified command dealing with the day-to-day decisions and tough decisions, and i think as david mentioned, we are recognizing the preparedness was

not as good as it should have been especially with the fact to the national spill or a spill with significant impacts on the livelihoods of people. many community members going around the gulf and saw the consequence, the daily lives and direct consequence and some of the long term consequences both in terms of livelihood and the logical consequence that contains to this. i guess my hope is that we remember the lessoned learn and that we put into place a system that acknowledges the severity of consequences should we be as unprepared as we were. in putting in place those systems so we can enable the safe development of energy, but really considers the potential bad consequence if we don't have the systems in place. >> i'm paul, a geologist by

education, 30 years experience in the industry, and my hope is that this committee works to regain the public's trust which is the license to operate for the industry in the deep water. we learned a lot from the incident. much work has been done, and the opportunity for this committee is to build on that existing body of work and to establish safe work procedures and clean up response for the years to come. i thank you for the opportunity to serve, and i look forward to serving. >> good morning. i'm richard sears. most recently, i served as chief scientist to the national commission on the bp deepwater horizon blowout and spill. pretty that, i had 33 year career with shell as geophysicist and senior executive and for seven years was responsible for shell's global exploration in deep water

and development activities, so i brought that experience to the commission's work and i hope to bring that experience also to the work of this committee, and i look forward to extending the work that we did on the commission to understand the roots of the accident and also fold into that the work that's going on with the other investigations that some are still ongoing. >> good morning. i'm patrick little, commanding officer the coast guard marine safety center. we conduct planned review of commercial vessels and provideses other services to the coast guard. i'm obviously career coast guard with a variety of assignments in my service of almost 25 year career. my goal is to improve the status quo with respect to filling safety and environmental protection. thank you.

>> good morning, i'm walter cruickshank, the deputy director of ocean bureau energy management and enforcement. i've been with the bureau since 1988 in various capacities. what i'm hoping for from this committee as you all know is we've taken a lot of substantial steps to try and improve the safety of offshore operations, but i think there's obviously a lot more to do, and rather just thinking what we can do right now, i'm looking forward to working with this committee to understand how we can organize ourselves strategically for the long term to stay in front of the next new wave of new technologies and types of operations we're going to see in the future. >> i'm nancy leveson, a professor at mit in aerospace engineering, although my specialty is more general, systems safety engineers. i've been doing this for about 30 years, and i worked in nearly every industry at some point in

my career, and although there are differences in the problems in each industry and in the culture particularly, my hope for the committee is that we'll be able to implement some of the lessons learned from successes in other industries in preventing accidents. >> i'm charles williams. i'm with well engineers and what we call drilling in shell these days. previous to that, i was vice president of research and development for shell, and then i had a temporary assignment in there of vice president of hurricane recovery in charge of all the reconstruction work we did after the hurricanes including the extension leg platform reconstruction. also on the -- chaired the industry task group for the

center of offshore safety and chaired a task force on containment. i'm on the governing board of the marine well containment company, and i'm on the operating committee for the marine well containment project, and what i really look forward to and hope for is that we make a significant technical contribution to prevention and in the industry, but also that we make a significant contribution to management systems and safety management systems and their contribution to prevention. thank you. >> my name is steve hickman. i'm involved in geophysical research from the academic side. my background is in solid geophysics, rock mechanics, and fluid and flow deaf fer mages. i was involved in the macondo

blowout response with tom and others as well as the well kill and cementing teams. it was a sobering experience i hope we don't have to live through again. i hope we can identify what we do and don't know about engineered and geological barriers to containment of oil so we can exploit the resources safely and what we don't know, have a path forward to answer the questions and regain the public trust in our ability to explore deep water and oil safely. >> i'm don jacobsen, the -- i've got 30 years now with the industry. i was a great civil engineer, but trained as a drilling engineer with shell and worked up through a number of assignments where i ran the global drilling well business that charlie talked about. prior to taking a head of a global hse and sustainable

development for shell where i did that for a couple years. i left, went to another company for a ye, and now the last two years i've been with noble corporation, a global drilling contractor providing the offshore rigs like the deepwater horizon that drill for oil and gas around the world. in that role, i'm responsible for the safe and effective operations of the units around the world and the construction of new units we'll building, a number of them around the world. i'll express my first expectation for the committee is that we improve the kind of the safety and effectiveness of our industry. i think we got the where with all around the table to help do that. my hope would be that that translates into greater access of offshore drilling around this country because it's a great energy supply for the country. thank you. >> thanks. my name is christopher smith, the deputy assistant secretary

for oil and natural gas at the u.s. department of energy. in that role, i'm responsible for the oil and gas programs for the u.s. doe. i also recently served at designated federal official for the oil spill commission created by the president to look into this disaster which released the report we're about to hear about in a few moments. prior to this role, i started my career as an army officer and spent about 11 years after that working for chevron in various roles. it was a combination of experiences giving me a real appreciation for the work and difficult and dangerous work producing our oil and gas resources offshore, so in addition to all the other sentiments expressed here in the last couple minutes, i hope that we're able to awry that conclusion that help ensure that the folks who do this important work are able to work safely and return to their families every day, so thank you for the opportunity to serve.

>> thank you, chris. let me comment by observation that this group has enormous diversity of experience and insight, but also shares a common purpose by listening to the comments going around the table. i think the nation calls on us to surrender a service here, and someone may have asked why we are covered on tv and why we have a public framework that we do. i commented about several of you that this is in large measure, we will be successful on a large measure with our ain't to maintain the public trustment i think people around the world is looking to this industry, this government, and this committee in some cases to give confidence we can proceed with the expiration -- exploration around the world for petroleum. the record should note we have the diversity challenge, but a shared and common intent. it is very important, i think,

to think about the different sectors represented here. i'm going to introduce michael bromwich, and i just want to comment on that. for me, it was an enormous experience about the first week or two in may, and it went through the entire summer into september, and you get to know people, and you get to know people, how people think, and certainly like in the case of steve when you talk to people at midnight and wondering what's going to happen at six o'clock in the morning, you reach conclusions about what people really intend to do and what their competence and intents are, but mike represents an organization that really, in my view, had some enormously dedicated people. those people were dedicated at that time. we're going to hear from some today. they are dedicated now, and i think in the aftermath what i

observed with my interaction with them they believe deeply the role of the federal government can be impactful in response to energy development, and one is for oversight from the government. in large part, this community will spend time trying to help them out and encourage and support them. i wanted to comment by way of introducing mike and his organization that it's a worthy thing we do to provide support to mike and all the people he represents. mike, turning it over to you. >> thanks very much, tom, and i want to thank you all for being here today. i think people attending here or watching now know why we picked this group. we picked tom because we're already 20 minutes ahead of schedule which is great news and unusual. [laughter] rather than take a break after we've worked for a few minutes, let's move right to the first session. we're extraordinarily fortunate

to have profession cherry murray from harvard university here with us today who brings here an enormously impressive background in a variety of fields. professor murray got her bachelor of science and ph.d. in physics from the massachusetts institute of technology. she's spent a number of years working at the bell labs rising eventually to be the senior vice president for physical science and requireless research -- wireless research. she moved on to another lab rising to be deputy director and principle associate director for science and technology, and last but not least, in july of 2009, she was named dean of the harvard school of engineers in applied science and professor of applied science and professor of fizz sicks. in addition to all of those

qualifications, she's a member of the national academy of science, engineering, and arts and sciences and further a fellow for the advancement of science as well as past president of the american physical society. with all that background, why she's here is she served as one of the distinguished commissioners on the president's commission on the bp oil spill. she is going to share with us her observations and share with us the findings and recommendations of the national commission. we're extremely fortunate to have professor murray here. welcome. >> thank you. good morning, and i would like to express the appreciation of the commission cochairs, bob graham and bill riley. the commission is now over.

we have produced our report which i will review with you, and i'm sure you've all read it, and you have two people on your committee who are intim matily familiar with the commission and the report. we had seven members of the presidential commission that began in june. the report was finished in record time after six months. we could only do that because we had such an incredible staff. we had 60 people on the staff of which the chief scientist was richard sears. what the president asked the commission to do was to determine the root cause of the deepwater horizon disaster, to evaluate the containment and cleanup responses, and this was

kind of being done in realtime as tom and his group was trying to manage this along with bp and some national labs folks, advise the president in how future oil and gas exploration and production can take place responsibly, particularly in more challenging deep water areas. we were not asked to assess legal cull pability, reformulate u.s. policy, or investigations. as you're aware there were at least 10, and now 12 other investigations of this disaster, and it was truly a disaster. not only did 11 people lose their lives, 17 badly injured, but the gulf has suffered a

considerable ecological disaster as well as the loss of fisheries, tourism, and other economic impacts. one of the first things that we did as a commission is go to the gulf and span out and talk to the people impacted, and it was pretty sobering to see this in realtime. we did conduct a thorough investigation of the engineering failures. we had a chief counsel. you will hear from the depp tie chief counsel, and there's a report of the chief counsel on the website as well as 21 staff papers, and what you see on the screen behind most of the committee is the cover of the

report, and this is also just a recommendations which are also on the website, so obviously i'm not going to go through this entire thing which would take way too long. our major finding was that the deepwater horizon disaster was foreseeable and preventable. errors and misjudgments by three companies, bp, halliburton, and transocean, played key roles in this tragedy, and that government regulation was not effective in preventing the disaster, and offshore drilling becomes even more complex and riskier. no one on the commission expects that offshore drilling will cease at all. we need a u.s. source of oil and

gas, but we need to do this in a more safe and responsible manner. when we don't know that much about the geological and other conditions, it becomes very risky. we believe that it can be done safely. the commission recognizes that significant steps have been taken thus far by both government including michael bromwich in reorganizing his organization, the mms, into -- i will call it boem -- but more needs to be done. we need more research in all areas related to exploration, production, response, and containment, and i hope this committee will oversee that research and suggest what needs to be done.

the industry needs to develop a far better culture of safety, and these are -- these recommendations are contained in the report. first off, there's a compelling need for a culture of safety. business as usual is not good enough. the north sea, both norway and u.k., have better safety regimes. australia and canada are revamping their safety regimes. industry, it is our belief that it is really industry-wide that this need for a culture of safety exists, and that they should establish a private organization which is not a

lobbying organization to -- excuse me -- to develop, adopt, and enforce standards of excellence to ensure continuous improvement in safety. this -- since as michael bromwich noted, i spent some years in the nuclear weapons regime in the liverpool national lab. the industry association for the nuclear power industry formed after three mile island a separate safety oriented organization called npoe -- npo, the nuclear power operators that does only safety

inspections of nuclear power plants which is quite effective at basically peer review. the industry is at the cutting edge of technology, and the industry needs to focus a lot more on safety. one of the things that i was quite suprised about is the -- if you look at the r and d that industry has put into deep water drilling, it's incredibly impressive. it is not that much different from going into space, however, if you look at the research and development that the industry has actually put into either safety or cleanup, it is less than 1% of the research and

development that they have put into drilling. this needs to change because we do need to drill safely for both the people on the rigs, the people who are affected by the ecological disaster in our environment. we also need to cooperate internationally to ensure safety and preparedness around the world and to learn from international data. we do not currently collect the data that would be useful for management of these spills. this was not a black swan event. i mean, it was certainly bigger than usual, but there were 79 other blowouts and well control issues in the gulf of mexico. it was not a lone company that

had this problem; although, some companies have a better safety culture than others. the whole industry has to have a far better process safety culture. what we looked at is as i was talking about improving the safety of offshore operations, safeguarding the environment, strengthening spill response planning and capacity, advancing well containment responsibility which is obviously after this event kind of important and it was very clear that nobody knew how to do this, and we had to invent things in realtime, restoring the gulf of mexico, which has had enormous ceo lodge calg impacts for the last 50

years due to dredging and oil and gas production as well as this major event, ensuring financial responsibility of the companies who are drilling, and also looking at frontier areas and the arctic. changing government -- we should be the most advanced in the world in drilling regulations and enforcement. we currently are not. as i said earlier, the commission is quite impressed with the department of interior moving as quickly as possible to reorganize. they definitely need to develop

a proactive risk based performance approach similar to what we call the safety case approach in the north sea. the international regulators forum is a good forum to express these new standards and revisions, and we suggested that the congress and the department of interior create an up dependent agency -- independent agencies within the department of interior with enforcement authority to make that separate from the revenue jeep rating agency -- generating agency. that has happened through executive order, and we also propose that the counsel and environmental quality in the department of interior should we vise and --

revice and strengthen the policies, practices, and procedures. we really do need to strengthen science and inner agency with noa and usgs. we also suggested one thing that has not happened which is if you look at the stable resources for regulatory oversight, they really have not been there from the u.s. government, and we suggest that similar to other countries, that industry fees support the regulatory agency, and that environmental science is also supported by industry fees. it will be interesting to see what this committee says about

that. the department of interior, what we suggested is that some rule making is quite important and some prescriptive detailed plans and risk analysis be done as well as a safety case. as you can see by the graph, there are more and more deep water drills being drilled in ultra deep water wells. it's not necessarily the water depth that's the issue here, although, that, of course, makes it a little more challenges, but it's really the geology of the deposits that are becoming really quite challenges, and the risks are actually quite high.

one of the things that we suggested is that the liability cap from the oil pollution act which is $75 million be lifted. that is way too low a cap. it does not insent vise the industry -- incentivize the industry to do the research and development. also, there is currently a $1 billion limit to the oil spill fund. clearly, as a result of this incident, $is 1 billion is not -- $1 billion is not going to be sufficient, and we suggested that be lifted as well. there is a considerable discussion going on about the six majors versus independent companies, and should

independent companies be allowed and be able to get insurance to do drilling in the gulf, so we did not address what the liability cap should be, but that clearly $75 million is too little. cop tapement and response -- containment and response -- well, we had to conduct the containment in realtime. this is not good enough. swot of this spill, the industry has come up with two different containment -- we'll call them services -- that is certainly better, and the bureau of ocean and energy management has

required that leases be given out. you cannot drill without having a containment capability which is certainly a good first step. we were quite disappointed that spill response technology had not advanced since the exxon-valdez. this is not sufficient, and way more research and development needs to be done by the industry and supported by government on spill response, and the spill response was really pretty minimal when you look at the oil that was actually collected. containment is critically important, and more research and development needs to be done on containment as well. government needs to have in-house containment expertise.

one of the things we suggested is that as was pretty apparent, the department of energy and the national lab does have expertise and should be brought to bear in the containment and response to such spills. in looking at restoration -- excuse me -- we suggested as have several members of congress, using 80% of clean water act penalties to restore the gulf. that is some money that is going

to be there and is quite important. in the restoration of the gulf, science and the coastal marine -- excuse me -- planning is quite important. timely, that -- finally that we ought to be extremely careful about the arctic because we know that spill response and the coast guard cannot get to the arctic very well, about 1,000 miles away from the bogart sea, and

cleanup is going to be considerably more difficult, and we don't know that much about the ecosystem in the life of the arctic, so we suggested that the arctic be developed, but more slowly so that some research could go on, and one of our commissioners, fred olmer, is now named head of the arctic counsel. i think what i'll do because i'm could coughing is to stop there and allow you to ask questions. >> thank you very much, professor mar -- murray. we appreciate that. we'll start the questioning that will be limited to the members of this committee.

>> cherry, thank you very much. i recognize your service on the mission and in other roles where we had the pleasure of working together, so thank you. your comment about the nuclear industry, and we'll hear more from don, but if we think about the nuclear industry and npo, you'll note that the government involvement has been extensive. there's a commission -- >> right. >> there's an advisory committee on reactor safeguards which is a bit of an an loll to this committee. did the commissioner -- do you have any insights as to why there's a difference tween the two industries? let me comment that three mile island you mentioned was the initiating event. do you see a parallel as far as deepwater horizon being an initiating event, and did you

spend time on the deep understanding why one industry is so heavily engaged by the federal government, and the other is not? >> we did have a number of discussions about this. the oil and gas industry is a little bit more complex than the nuclear power industry in that there are on each of the deepwater rigs, let me just say 20 contractors. it's always more difficult to have a safety regime with contractors who work for different companies. nevertheless, that is also true in the north sea, and in the north sea, the rig itself is required to have the safety case, not the operating company, and i suggested that this committee may want to look at that as a model. the people who live on the rig actually want to be safe, and

it's really important to have a safety regime that allows for things like whistleblowers and the -- there was one argument that each well is completely different. they are not like nuclear powerplants where there's six different technologies and they are all pretty much the same. i would argue that it is true each well is completely different depending on the geology, depends on the design. there are best practices in well containment and shared best practices are really quite important. one of the things that happened with npo, as you're probably well aware, is that about nine years into npo's forming, 100%

of the nuclear operators were members of this committee. the -- each of them had to have insurance in order to operate which is slightly different from the oil and gas industry. many of the operators are self-insured, but the insurance was an insurance pool, and the rate of insurance premium was dependent on the npo rating, and so there was quite a bit of -- npo had a huge amount of force in the industry because difference between a rating of good and excellent meant a huge amount of insurance premium that

had to be paid. also, if npo does very serious inspections, their nuclear navy people, and so they're pretty serious about it. it's an inspection that is about two weeks. it is a -- i will say it's nonbinding, and it's not -- it's not open. it's actually proprietary, and there's teaching in npo, and these people go on inspections, but it's industry learning from each other, and i think that -- there can be an analog for this for well control. npo does coordinate with the nuclear regulatory commission. npo does not set standards. the nrc sets standards, but if

npo finds that a power company is not operating with the safety regime that it believes is important, it basically parades this in front of the entire industry. ceo s have been fired, and it has real teeth. i think if the analog is the operators of the drilling platforms, i think that there is some analogy that can be -- >> thank you. >> let me encourage all of panel members to take this opportunity to learn more about the commission's results as well as cherry's own insight. i would encourage questions from

the panel. this may be one of our few opportunities to engage the commission so directly. paul? >> sure. not quite as familiar with npo and nrc, but in our industry, would you comment on the role that you see going forward with the api who has set standards for a number of years in our industry. you made a comment earlier about the need to set a safety commission separate from the lobbying effort which i presume is directed at api, but could you maybe compare and contrast the role that the api plays with our industry with your piece of the nuclear industry? >> sure. yeah, the nuclear industry also has the nuclear energy industry association in the eye which is an api-like body. it is a lobbying organization that gets the industry together. it does actually look at safety standards and things, but it doesn't set the standards, the

nuclear regulatory commission does in rule making. i think that api analog is nei, and that the oil and gas industry really does need something like npo. npo does nothing but safety. it does not lobby. it does not set standards. it just does industry-to-industry peer review of the safety regime of the powerplants. >> one second, just another brief note on the microphones. the audience is having trouble hearing. make sure jr. mrch is on. you can see the green flashing light. that's when you speak. pull it close to yourself and identify yourself before you ask your question for the court reporter. >> i would point out there's differences between the nuclear

and oil industry. nuclear is 20% of one-third of energy, that's one-fifteenth, while the oil and gas is 75%. while the rigs are being operated as i'm speaking today, so you have an order of magnitude difference the size, and you probably have another order of magnitude difference of complexity, so i would submit that controlling and improving the oil industry is a little bit more difficult than nuclear industry, but having said that, in my mind, failure of human organizations was probably the biggest contributing factor to the accident. do you have suggestions to the oil industry that go beyond, you

know, the npo-type activities? >> you're right that there's way more of our energy coming from oil and gas, not from the u.s., but imported. there are about 105 nuclear powerplants in the u.s.. they were being built when npo was around. i'm not suggesting that the -- all of the shallow water and relatively -- let me say less complex rigs also be part of this regime, but the more complex rigs be, and when you look at that, then there are

hundreds as o pose -- opposed to thousands. you're absolutely right that it's -- and it's also true for nuclear power. it is the human organization that was a root cause for this. it was human lack of judgment, and also the fact that people who were contractors to the operator could have felt a little bit anxious about bringing up safety. in fact, we know from the testimony that a number of people did not bring up their issues with safety on the rig,

and i don't know, i mean, certainly from my interaction in the national labs, our biggest safety issue were with contractors so i think that needs to be seriously thought about. how do you ensure that the team which includes up to 20 different contractors on the rig acts like a team? i think that this is doable. it may need retraining as a team. this is actually what is done in the north sea so we have some examples. >> dr. murray, can i follow up on that? you made a comment earlier talking about the u.k. and the safety regime, and made a comment if i heard right that the workers there want to be safe, and that by inference says

workers elsewhere don't want to be safe, but i think the point is more that in the safety case regime, there is, you know, identifying the hazards and understanding the roles and responsibilities with those hazards make for a safer work environment. >> right. well, i internet didn't mean people in the gulf of mexico don't want to be safe. in fact, they do. workers on the rig do, indeed, want to be safe which is why there's an opportunity for doing a better, let's call it a safety case, for all of the people on the rig whether they belong to which company or not, it doesn't matter. the there's one difference that may or may not play a role in the north sea, and that is certainly in the nor wedge

january case, the workers are unionized, and that has a big role to play in the safety. i still believe you can do training, you can do roles and responsibilities as an entity that's going to be operating together for the next three months, and that you can do a safety case. one of the things that we learned which i was quite surprised about, it kind of shocked me, is that bp and transocean did not have an agreement on how they would do well control, and, you know, this is not acceptable. i mean, well control is one of the most critical things to -- i mean, if you manage the well, then you don't have to worry about containment, spill cleanup, and anything else.

>> [inaudible] >> thank you for your comments. >> speak into the mic please. >> sorry. thanks. i'm joseph gebara. the question i have is related to the safety case in the u.k. and safety case in norway backed up by guidance notes which are similar to the api standards that we have over here and in norway it's the standards, and in your discussion, i value a lot the api standards with a lot of experience to build on. i served the last 12 years on committees that developed those standards. what is the -- in your view from the commission, what's the way forward in that regard because i don't think as an industry we can move on without having those standards in some form or another. >> i completely agree you need standards, and how those standards are determined, i

think just as in the nuclear case, the nuclear regulatory commission defines what the standards are. where it gets that from is obviously the operators, and some judgment. i think api can definitely propose standards and its up to the bureau of ocean and energy management to accept them, amend them, and make them even stronger, and they should be the owner of the standards. >> thank you for the clarification. >> yeah, dr. murray, i was very impressed by your report in many aspects including the documentation, and one thing that struck me in addition to the fact that people within the various subcontractors had concerns not passed up to the key decision makers. there was stove piping or walls

involving safety. that concerned me, but also the rapidly unfolding events of the disaster. there were people who didn't have time to react, and if they had time to think about it, maybe they would have reacted differently and not have died and resulted in this horrible disaster. have you thought of other ways of training people on the rig floor to react more rapidly in cases of these incidences, small that gives people real reactions to the signals they are seeing. there's something we have about not believing there's a real disaster unfolding urn your feet. in terms of training of people working on the rig itself, on the floor. >> that's certainly a good point. one of the things that usually happens in a disaster like this is that it was right at the

shift change between shifts, and everyone was in a hurry, and when that happens, you have app ability to not make the right judgment calls. also, -- i actually think that training the team together is really important not just individuals with a simulator. i don't know exactly -- and this is something that api or maybe even this committee can think about -- is there a better training exercise which has here's what's happened, what do you do? i think that would be extremely helpful to train the teams on the rigs. the other thing i will point out

is that the negative pressure tests which was obviously misinterpreted on the rig that night did not really -- there was no agreement as to how that negative pressure test should be done. this is something that obviously needs to get fixed. >> i have not read all the report, and i was surprised to not see any mention of any kind of a real-time operational safety group or even a person that was consulted when these decisions were made. most industries have such a thing. when you have accidents, after

challenger, after colombia, one of the things they found is those organizations had become silent and were never not consulted in the decision making. did i just missed something? was there something there? and it just was not mentioned? >> as far as i know, there was re were there accept their wor the people on shore who were in a situation where people did not know what to do should have been contacted, but as far as we can tell, there was no contact of people on shore. whether the people on shore could have done anything, i do not know. but that is one possibility, when training whole crew on the rig, including all of the contractors, is that there is a

60 -- a safety committee that stands back and thinks about these decisions going forward. >> doctor murray, he made a comment that this was not a black-swan event, and referred to the number of events that the commission had observed when they were going through their investigation. in your discussion with industry brisbane's throughout the process and the investigation, and looking at statements that are being made as we move to the one-year anniversary, do you have an opinion about the degree to which industry is dealing with this as a black-swan event

or something that companies can take a close second look at do you have an opinion based on your experiences on how that is going? >> i certainly have an opinion, but i will not state it. the reason that the commission came down on the side of it is industry-wide, it is not just say one rogue company, is because it is quite clear from our investigation, and you can hear this from sean grimsley later on this morning, that there were at least three companies who made really seriously bad calls in judgment. halliburton, who is the largest

cementing company, and does this for everyone, went ahead and, despite the fact that there were three tests, went ahead and pumped the cement. quote bill riley when he asked the ceo of halliburton whether or not a burden on the pumps that cement for bp. i doubt it. they were doing their job, but somehow the fact that the cement, the slurry, was known not to be good, and they did it anyway, was indicative of something that is not right about the industry.

also, transocean and b.p. did not have as i said an agreement for how they did well control, which is, i will say, the most important thing to do while you are drilling a well. so, whose fault was that? i would say both of them. some companies do have a far better safety regime, but they still operate on rigs that are leased and owned by other companies, and with a number of contractors, and do we know that they have a good safety case? i really don't think so. >> thank you.

one of your comments, you said you did not feel like water that was driving curling risk, but you felt like killing risks right to increase in the future. could you say a few words around the commission's findings in that regard. >> what i meant by that is death means higher pressure, colder temperatures, -- depth means higher pressure, call whatever, and that makes it more complex. what makes it complex is the geology. it should not be water depth that is relevant, but how complex is the geology of this well. there were serious worries of lost returns, and part of the judgments that were made were to mitigate those worries about the

fracture of the formation, which is,mud was circulated very slowly, and things like that, which, if there was to appoint a safety organization that look at all of the decisions and the big picture, they might have said that is ok for not fracturing the formation, but the cement leaky probably full of -- the segment will probably be full of mud, and you should take that into consideration. each decision was taken one after the other and not a big picture of, ok, we have a serious issue here with all these different issues in this

well what is the best decision to take, not just of, we fix that one, let's go ahead and see if that worked. >> thank you very much. >> you mentioned that there are a number of less disastrous things that have occurred and the need to do some risk analysis to understand the nature of the risk of drilling cherry i was wondering if you expand on that. >> i was -- one of the things that was noted was that in the gulf there is well control incidents that are not reported by country -- by companies unless there is a spill of oil and gas. if there is a well control incident, instead of saying we could learn from this, it is not

brought forward as part of the database. all people who are actually, all industries who are actually seriously worried about safety, look at what is actually -- look at what has actually happened and what are the precursor to a possible safety condition and not just looking at the incidents that were of a certain severity. that is one thing that if there npo- let's just say, and like entity, they could look at the precursors way better than the agency can. >> i completely agree with you,

and there has been a thorough analysis done of the last couple years, and found out that many of the accidents were not reported, and he had to rely on oral communications of people who may not have remembered. swans were mentioned a couple of times. ofre talking about talkees extreme value and contributions. would you suggest that perhaps a more formalized process of reporting, and i hate to say that perhaps to api some other organizations, but also a more thorough actuarial analysis of

extreme distributions is in order because we do not know when we make assumptions that are completely arbitrary? >> yes. i do agree. i think reporting of any loss of well control, even if it is only for a minute and it is weekend, can help the industry learned how to deal with these events, and also, of course, it would be helpful to have the statistics to know, are we doing better? >> thank you. >> they had to derive their real-time monitoring with respect to a response. the most significant was dispersants and how to do real- time monitoring. do you have a view as to how to

take those lessons learned and where we institutionalize it, and who owns the execution of a more rigorous monitoring regime? >> you reminded me what i was going to say, but i did not in my earlier talks, which was the u.s. government needs to measure the amount of oil spilled. just period. finally, after some amount of time, say, a month, noaa and usgs did a very good measurement of the oil was spilling out. i think it is really important if there is such a spill that some organization in the u.s. government -- it could be the doe national labs, together with

noaa, need to be deployed immediately to measure the amount of spillage. why is that? there is a conflict of interest with b.p. measuring how much oil things bill because they will pay penalties for the amount of oil that is being spilled. assuming that the responsible party is responsible for doing the measurement i think is a bad assumption. they will measure it, of course, and they are also doing the -- assessment, and there will be probably in the courts dispute about how much oil was there. but if the u.s. government was prepared quickly to measure the oil spill, we would not have these disputes. for real-time monitoring, one of

the things that steve chu and the panel noted was that there really was no pressure gauge that was accurate on the blowout for vendor. so, you could not measure the pressure down hole, i will say, or down at the sea floor, and that would be awfully important, and until the capping device was put on with pressure gauges, nobody could tell whether the well was gone to blow out into the formation or not. that is kind of important. having better real-time monitoring his probably -- probably should be a better regulation that he should have real-time monitoring for this kind of situation. >> any more questions from the panel?

just a couple things. we had two panel members not with us. am i not coming through? we had two panel members not with us. david is. noaa -- the is -- david is from noaa. i wanted to have a final comment from dr. murray. [unintelligible] dr. murray, in the end, the american public wants to understand whether moving forward with deepwater drilling, particularly with the broadwater and deeper wells, is a need to pull -- is it doable?

, my personal sense is it is still -- >> my personal sense is it is the will. the industry needs to make it more self. it is perfectly doable. i am impressed with the technology in order to do the drilling. or technology needs to be developed, and some has in just responding to this spill, in things like containment and skimming, and something needs to be done about or just needs to be understood about our dispersants could under sea? did they work? i don't think we know the answer to that. unfortunately, we had this as an experiment to figure out whether

that helped or not. >> thank you. let me thank you again, professor murray, for coming here and taking the time ensuring the recommendations of the president's commissions, but also assuring us your own views on this in response to questions that a committee has. thank you very, very much for being here. we will take a 10-minute break, and we will start back up at 10:35, if my watch is accurate. thanks very much. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by nation

[inaudible conversations] during the second panel of the ocean energy safety advisory committee meeting, dallas discussed their mandate moving forward and lessons learned from the deepwater horizon oil spill. [inaudible conversations] we are a couple of minutes behind on our proposed schedule here but if we could ask again ask the speakers to bring the microphone close to them and make sure you are speaking into it. please identify yourself before you ask questions just for the

public records, and at 10:40tard get started please. >> we will begin the next panel. >> we are going to go into our second panel which is focused on the investigations into the causes of the deepwater horizon blowout the investigations into the deepwater horizon blowout. we are happy to have mr. grimsley andand mr. winter. he is professor of engineering practices and the department of marine practices. he served as secretary of the navy, and lead america's navy and marine corps teams. previously he served as

president of north from grumman's. he is also a graduate of the university of southern california management policy institute, and harvard university program for senior executives if in national and international security. in 2002 he was elected a member of the national academy of engineering. sean grimsley was chief counsel on the bp the deepwater controlling panel. he was a graduate of the university of texas, and the university of michigan law term. it was a judicial law clerk to harry edwards here in the d.c. circuit as well as sandra day o'connor in the united states supreme court from 2003-2004. it is our great pleasure that have dr. winter and mr. grimsley here.

>> please to be here this morning. i will be presenting the results of the national academy investigation into the causes of the deepwater horizon. i will know that that i will be presenting what had been our interim findings which were first released back in november, and because of the process than -- that the national academy goes through with a formal peer review one of our findings, the next phase of our report which hopefully will be available around june has yet to be released. i will be giving you the report that we gave to the secretary and the staff back in november. in fact, i will be using the same charts for the most part during the presentation. on our activities in the reason for it, the national academy of engineering does such study as a

matter of course. this one was in particular a request from secretary salazar. our focus is very specifically on the causes for the blowout explosion and subsequent fire. with recommendations to come as to hopefully how to prevent such events from reoccurring in the future. the interim report was specifically intended to provide the secretary and the staff with a preliminary assessment of our findings, but also to inform but the oil spill commission and the marine board of inquiry in terms of some of the aspects of our findings. and as i stated earlier, if we will be having our final report in the june time period. a few notes on the committee make up. the committee includes a number of individuals, 15 in total, on the committee. many of whom are national academy members, some are not.

the individuals have been chosen to span a spectrum of expertise that runs the gamut of everything from geophysics to petroleum engineering, marine engineering, but also organizational behavior, human factors, accident forensics, and safety systems. a very broad spectrum of expertise, and also reflecting both industry, current and retired, as well as academia. all selected with specific consideration to avoid any conflicts of interests. a few notes on the context in terms of establishing expectations here, if you will. we have noted on several occasions and i want to note again this morning that it may not be possible in the opinion of the committee to definitively established all aspects of the causation for

this particular accident. that is in part due to the loss of some of the critical witnesses come out the sinking of the raid, obviously, but most importantly the difficulty of conducting reliable forensics on the deck of the macondo well. we do believe that we have developed a good understanding of many aspects of this particular in this event and believe it is worth while sharing those with the administration as well as this particular committee. we have identified in particular the decision to proceed to temporary abandonment in spite of the failed and negative pressure tests as precipitating elements of the blowout and the subsequent release of hydrocarbons. we view this is particularly important because up until that point in time, there wasn't that

control over the well, and there were many options available to the crew to be able to proceed in various ways. however, once the decision was made to proceed to temporary abandonment, those options for the most part were taken away, and of course, the subsequent events were set in place. we have noted in particular that that decision -- the impact of that decision was compounded by a number of factors, one having to do with the delays in recognizing that flow was starting in the well. and then when that flow was in fact observed, the actions that was taken were very limited, they were not what one would characterize as aggressive well control action, and that further compounded the events. furthermore, we note that the

b.o.p. was unable to control the blowout, and we are still in the process of evaluating the forensic evaluation that has been submitted to understand in the titular the extent to which that inability to control well blowout was due to failure mechanism in the b.o.p. and/or limitations inherent in that particular b.o.p. and its questionable suitability perhaps for this particular well. would we look at the overall implications -- when we look at the overall implications, we've identified several ways of characterizing this. one of which is that we believe that it suggests an insufficient discipline, in particular, and

insufficient consideration of risk. that calls into question the adequacy of operating knowledge and training of the key personnel that were involved in that decision. and we note also, and i was a consistent with dr. murray's previous comments, that this was one of a series of actions that reduce the margins of safety associated with the well and well controlled. in particular, it is very important to note not just this one particular decision but also a number of other decisions all made in the course of construction of this particular well, which we believe potentially contributed to the blowout. and which all had a questionable considerations associated with them. i will note the wide range of

considerations in here, everything from a very specific technical the citizens associated with the well design and the design of the cementing, for example, to more organizational, managerial decisions such as changeups of key personnel on the rig, just prior to this particular incident. we see here a situation where multiple decisions apparently contributed in various ways to the situation on the rig, one of which the decision to proceed to temporary abandonment precipitated the specific loss of well control, all of which has caused us to focus on behavioral considerations as a root cause of this particular incident. we note in that regard that

there were insufficient checks and balances for these decisions. the question of schedule as a relates to schedule costs versus the consideration for well safety we note an absence of formal mechanisms for properly comparing and weighing those considerations and making an appropriate determination as to what is a viable balance between those considerations. we note that none of these various decisions that we have identified were identified as flawed or corrected, either by the operating management of the various companies involved, and while i have be pat -- bp identified here come the other contractors were involved, and we know that those decisions were not identified in a timely

manner by mms, the coast guard, or any of the various organizations responsible for regulation in this particular domain. much has been said about the questions of cementing, and it does appear there was a failure of cement to create an .. mechanisms associated with that, and we are looking at a wide range of potential sources. it is our approach and methodology to consider any and all considering factors. we may or may not come up with a definitive determination as to the cause of the failure of the cement. we may identify a number of potential contributing factors.

that is part of our process, and also we think it is most appropriate in this particular case, becausehere a num >> that appeared to be wanting in terms of the technical decision-making process. similarly with the well control actions and the bop in particular, we noticed that this obviously did not recapture control of the well. the extent to which that is due to the timing of the well control actions, the extent to which that is due to the design, and to the extent that is due to the maintenance and potential failure mechanisms on the bop are still under evaluation, and hopefully will be at least somewhat informed by the forensic evaluation at bnv performed under contract here recently. we also note the failure of the emergency disconnect system to

properly separate out and permit the rig to move away from the macondo well and the potential impact that had on the subsequent loss of the rig. these aspects of both under of current evaluation. other one aspect that has been discussed extensively at the marine core of inquiry in particular has to do with the potential mechanisms for igniting the gas. i will note that the committee has assessed that given the very large qualities of gas that were released on to the rig, coupled with the very low winds that were observed at the time of this accident, the belief is that ignition was likely to occur one way or another and while we may be able to determine what a more likely source of ignition was, this was

something that probably was going to occur irrespective of that unique source. one other aspect that we're looking at here has to do with the alarm systems. and a certain about the failure to provide a timely general alarm, and the potential impact that that may have had in terms of the extent of injuries and loss of life that occurred on the rig. obviously, none of this was actually going to avoid the actual blowout, but may have if corrected in the future, the potential for minimizing the loss of life associated with such events. when we look at the event in a total integrated fashion, we note first of all, this is an inheritly risky business. as i've said on a number of occasions, these are complex

wells, drilled using very complex drilling rigs. in uncertain geology and environment at sea that is always changing. that industry a certain degree of danger associated with them. that needs to be recognized, it needs to be factored in, it needs to be considered on an ongoing basis to assess what the appropriate margins of safety should be for the construction of wells like this. furthermore, there's a significant need to ensure that we learn from previous near misses. much has been made, for example, of the proceeding event in australia off of australia to monterra blowout and the question of whether or not that event and others both in the gulf of mexico and elsewhere

around the world were properly considered and factored in to the training and to the operations that were used for the macondo well. we believe that a system's approach, sometimes referred to as process safety approach in the chemical industry is needed to be able to integrate and evaluate all of the various factors that potentially can impact the safety of a well and in particular, well control. assess those, integrate them, monitor them, understand what is happening to those margins of safety as changes are made and in this well as there are in many cases, there were many significant changes made during the course of construction here, and ensure that those changes whether they are in a design, or in the response to various

geological discovers, understand if they are impacting the margin of safety, and take those consideration into effect when one is deciding how to proceed on various aspects of the well construction. and we are right now in the process of completing our investigations. we do have the data that we need at this point, we believe. we are also in the process of having a number of the discussions with other regulatory organizations in particular, those in both norway and the uk to understand their perspective on similar matters. and we are in the process of putting together our final report which will consider our overall assessment of the causes and our recommendations for the future, in particularly focus on future regulatory regimes.

and with that, i would be more than pleased to take any questions that you may have this morning. >> what i think we're going to do is have mr. grimsley give the presentation and open it up for questions for both of you. so mr. grimsley? >> thank you. thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today. i know time is short. so i'm going to try to get right to it. there's no too much that i would disagree with that was just presented by don. i think don has looked over our report, chief council report, and probably sees a lot of similarities to the presentation he just gave. obviously, the chief councils report, i don't know how many of you had a chance to read. 371 pages, many of you have probably not read the whole thing. in 20 minutes, i'm not going to go through all of the findings. what i'm going to try to do today is limit it to some findings that maybe of interest to you and some recommendations that maybe of interest to you as you guys go forward with your mandate. >> sean, could you try to speak more closely to the mike?

>> yes. just one caveat before i begin, i was deputy chief council to the commission. you will notice there are some recommendations in the presentation. those are my recommendations based on the investigation that we performed. these have not been vetted with the commission. cherry murray ably explained what the recommendations of the commission are. these are much more modest recommendations based on observationing that we made during the investigation. so just to start with a little background, the commission had as one of its missions to examine the relevant facts and circumstances concerning the root causes of the deep water horizon oil disaster and then to submit a final report to the president with its findings and options for consideration within six months of the date of the commission's first meeting. the first meeting was in july. the commission had to issue its report january 11th. we -- the chief councils investigator team then issued a more lengthy chief council

report on root causes. the point here is just we had a short amount of time in which to do a very detailed investigation. the task of the chief councils investigative team was not the task of the commission. the commission of had a much broader task. what we were asked to do was investigate and identify the root cause of the blowout. there were other staff members and individuals who investigated containment and response. as you know, and as we made clear in our reports, we did not investigate the bop failure, postexplosion and blowout. there was an ongoing forensic investigations at the time. we were writing our reports. it was not going to be finished in time for the deadline. that's simply not in the reports. we had a number of specific tasks, we presented preliminary hearings, we assisted in preparing the commission's final report, and prepared and submitted chief council with

more detail findings. the two reports are the commissions report, chapter 4 which we were involved with sets out the commissions findings reporting root causes, and then the chief councils report is a more detailed explanation in the findings contained in chapter 4. it was contained some additional information that we obtained after the commissions report was published, but before we actually issued the chief councils report. fortunately for us, all of the additional information that we received confirmed the findings that were already in chapter 4. so what happened at a very high level? i'm not going to get into all of the technical failures. again, those are in the reports. here's the schematic of the macondo well, at least how the macondo well was supposed to look during the temporary abandonment process. what you have here, mud in the well displaced down to 3,000 feet below the sea floor and mud in the ricer that's been displaced as well. there's about 8,000 feet of heavy weight mud that's been

displaced at this point in time. the key thing to keep in mind is during the temporary abandonment procedure, the only real barrier in place between the rig and the hydrocarbon bearing zone was the cement job at the bottom. the cement job failed and hydrocarbon got up and there was a straight shot up to the rig. that's a key thing to keep in mind about the temporary abandonment procedure and some of the recommendations i'll have here. now the bop was there. but the bop was open. and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute. the bop in that state really is a contingent barrier. let's go through what happened a very high level. the bottom pull cement job was the only active, i use that in quotes, barrier when the blowout occurred. the put was removed 8,000 feet and and the bop was open. bp chose not to put additional barriers in place, prior to displacement of mud.

that's something that bp could have done, but did not do. next the bottom hole cement job failed. we may never be able to identify the specific failure mode for the bottom hole cement job. what we do know, it did not isolate the hydrocarbon bearing zone. there are many possible reasons for why the cement job may have failed. this was unusually tricky, and moreover, the foam cement that was pumped by haliburton was likely unstable. that may have contributed to the failure of the cement as well. so once that bottom hole cement had failed, there were no barriers, and nobody detected the failure until it was too late. first of all, there was a misinterpreted negative pressure test and once they proceeded beyond the negative pressure, the rig crew failed to detect the influx of hydrocarbons.

and a key point to keep in mind here is that that negative pressure test and the failure to detect the hydrocarbons depended both on human judgment. really we had one active barrier, the cement, which was tested by the negative pressure test. that was it. everything else depended on human judgment. when human judgment failed here, there was no additional line of defense. that's critical in understanding what the root causes are here. again i'm not going to go into all of the technical failures. this is a slide from bp's accident investigation report. it basically illustrates their view of the world that is all of these events had to line up almost coincidently for this event to occur. and it's true. all of these things did have to happen. all of these mistakes. but it's not just coincidental that all of them happened to a line. there was something in the background that caused that.

a single failure mechanism. that's as we have identified a failure of management. a failure to manage risk, a failure to manage personnel, a failure to train adequately, a failure to ensure good decision making. as a result of those failures of management, these eight mistakes lined up. and keep in mind, each of these was not just a mistake, it was an opportunity to stop the blowout from happening. and it was a failure of management that resulted in nobody stopping it at any of those points. and i want to go over just briefly what the management failures are that we identified in our report. i'm not going to talk through at length all of them. but the first is an absence of a sense of real responsibility. one the problems that cherry murray identified is that there are upwards of 20 plus contractors out on one of these

rigs. not only are there contractors, but you have bp, or the operators, individuals on shore, and then you have the team that's actually out on the rig. so there are a lot of different sides of decision making. what we saw here, different contractors were making critical decisions, often times without communicating information they had learned while making those decisions to other decision makers. for instance, bp on shore made the decision on the well design. and on some of the cementing issues. but did not communicate the risks that might be associated with those cement issues or well design decisions with the rig crew, the individuals who actually had to monitor the well out there on the rig or conduct the negative pressure test. related, we also found there was ineffective communication. not only between contractors and bp, but between the individuals on shore at bp and those out on

the rig. you've got the sense that there are a we give you information on a need-to-know basis and that proper context was not always provided for the individuals making real-time decisions. and that comes down to we believe a real lack of leadership and a lack of a safety culture. it's going to take leadership amongst the companies until the industry, we only looked at bp, it's going to take real leadership to change the safety culture and address some of the problems. i have some thoughts later on how the committee might address some of these things. it's also simply a safety culture issue. >> number two, setting people up for failure, and this comes back to what i had said earlier. there was an over reliance here on human judgment. the folks at bp trusted this rig crew, the folks at bp trusted the well site leaders. this was a very experienced rig crew. as you know, there were executives from bp that day out

on the rig to give this crew an award for safety. with that trust came too much reliance on human judgment. we know people make mistakes of if your redundancy that you are in place to prevent a disaster dependent on human judgment, you are going to end up in a situation where people make mistakes and you have a disaster. we also saw there was inadequate construction and untimely procedures. i'll go through an example of that. there was simply too little detail given to the rig crew that had to execute procedures by the folks on shore by bp. they were often given to the individuals on the rig late in the day untimely fashion so they did not have time to digest the procedures. something that's come up

already, we saw inadequate training. i'll talk more about that. also, finally, pour management of staffing. there was a sense that all personnel were fundable, so, for instance, the normal well site was taken off of the deep water horizon. who had experience as a well site, but not on the deep water, certainly didn't have the context that perhaps ronnie would have, but bp treated it's personnel basically as fundable to stick a new one out on the rig and everything will be fine. there needs to be a better consideration of staffing and personnel issues. and finally, inadequate risk assessment. what we saw was a lot of ad hoc and tunnel vision decision making, particularly in the last two weeks leading up to the blowout. and that's because there were serious gaps, we think, in bp's

risk regime and risk assessment regime. we also identified problems with safety metrics and processed safety. cost is easy to measure. people understand it. if some decision is going to increase cost, people appreciate it's going to costly decision. process safety is much harder to measure. certainly up front and even after the fact. so there will be a tendency for decisions unless there is a real robust risk recessment for decisions to be bias in favor of cost savings or safety. we saw that on the deepwater horizon with bp. that leads into the last point. focus on cost savings. >> sean, you have about five minutes. >> okay. so this is just an example of how many companies are out there, the org chart, these get

complicated. the example of the cement job, there were numerous, this is an example of the decision making. there were numerous risk factored associated, little to no communication of those with the individuals actually responsible for executing. it resulted in look at ridges one at a time, rather than collectively as a group. and one recommendation here is simply make clear who's responsible. there's been a tremendous amount of finger pointing after the fact. bp says it's haliburton's responsibility to pump the cement. haliburton's says it's bp's responsibility to design and if there's any problems with it it's their fault. what needs to be done is to make clear what entities are responsible for what decisions and identify one specific entity who's responsible for the overall operation. i would think that would be the operator, but we need to make that clear so that somebody -- decisions are not falling through the cracks and somebody is, in fact, taking

responsibility. a poor communication in example of that is the december 23 in the 2009 in the north sea, there was a near identical near miss on the transocean rig. transocean identified the problem there is. the problems were similar to those that led to the blowout in the gulf. but transocean did not adequately communicate those findings to it's own personnel. limited the distribution to the north sea, and completions operations because that happened to be where and at what stage of the proceedings it occurred. but the lessons would have been useful for everyone. and rather than distribute it broadly, and tell everybody that you need to look at this, they simply put it in a database that was accessible to people but there's no indication that anybody on the deepwater horizon saw that. create a centralized industry

wide system for alerting all players for lesson learned and near misses. people have talked about that. it's not just transocean. i think industry could do a better job of collecting that information itself. and keep better track of procedures used by different companies in order to facilitate study and identify of best practices. we've talked about over reliance on human judgment. you know, i'm not going to go back over that here. but another thing having to do with human judgment is there seems to have been an inadequate focus on technology. not drilling. i think the industry is advanced in that regard. but technology related to safety. it was one the biggest surprises, individuals coming in from the outside. the censors, many of them are antiquated, data presentation is antiquated, there are very few automated safety systems or checks. like on an airline or airplane, you could very easily have systems of automated warnings

for the drillers and the drill shack so they are not allying on a, themselves, and their own judgment, but b, the right data at the right time and making the right decisions. it appears this industry has lagged where there is no drilling efficiency pay off. this gives you a sense of just what the driller is seeing. again, we were quite surprised at the level of technology there. so the recommendation eliminate human judgment as much as possible, where mistake could have a human consequences. and require redundant dumb safety barriers, for instance, just have two active barriers. so that if one fails even though it's been tested, you've got the back up of another. and technology to eliminate elements were possible. i'll move quickly through a couple of these. we showed the slide at our hearing.

this was one the more surprising things that we saw. in the last seven days before the blowout, the temporary abandonment procedures were changed no fewer than five times by bp. and this is significant because you'll see in an april 14th e-mail, there was going to be a second barrier prior to the displacement. but by april 16th, the permit that was submitted to the mms has the barrier, the second barrier being put in place only after displacement. and the procedures then change yet again by april 20th on an off note that was sent out to the rig personnel, procedures. what this shows is ad hoc decision making. none of these changes went through any sort of formal risk analysis, because they simply weren't subject to any sort of formal risk analysis requirement within bp. here's a recommendation, bp did

not submit the plan with permit, did not develop until the last ten days within the blowout. when they had originally submitted the well plan, they wanted to leave themselves options at the end. they didn't want to tie themselves into the plan and have to go back to mms if they wanted to change. that led to ad hoc decision making that would allow greater time for agency review and force companies to develop the procedures before the last minute. also strict conference. bp did change the procedure that was approved by mms. i'm not suggesting it was a causal relationship change, but it was change made in ad hoc fashion. some people looked at it and said they thought the procedure were safer and went ahead and into it differently. requiring stricter to approve procedures will prevent that

type of ad hoc decision making and force companies to do real risk assessment. inadequate training for emergency events. there's a lot of training and a lot in the well control manuals on what to do during typical well control events where you have a small kick that can be identified, shut in, circulated out. but what we found was an amazing lack of procedures and training for real emergency events. so, for instance, when gas gets in the ricer -- riser and if it's a substantial amount of gas, you have little time. that gas expands upwards. it expands rapidly. once it hits the rig, you are in real problem. especially if it's a large volume. so much so this ignition was almost inevitable. here are the procedures in the well control manual. you go through the first eight steps trying to figure out what

the level of gas is. by the 9th step, you need to be prepared to send the gas overboard. in a situation like this, the individuals needed to be trained that this gas needed to go over board right away. not saying that over boarding the hydrocarbons would have presented disaster, particularly given the wind conditions. but they should have been much more willing and ready to send it over board immediately, given the situation. so recommendations require that companies train and drill for various emergency scenarios, such as blowout and require companies to submit energy procedures and training plans. and then finally, just a little bit on risk assessment, just the major process safety gaps. this will be the last thing. bp, like most of these companies i imagine, had very robust process safety risk assessment plans in place. but only for certain stages of the well design. so, for example, they have

robust risk analysis and pure review during the design phase, but not during the execute phase. yet many of the critical decisions on the design and procedure were made on the execute phase. we need to make sure that there is a good risk, formal risk evaluation system in place during all phases of the well. and lastly, and most critically important, perhaps, is that you have to have real post execution audit. for evaluating decisions that increase risk of low probability high consequence events. you saw the chart that bp had in their report. those things did have to align. if they had stopped it at any one the points, there wouldn't have been a blowout. that doesn't mean there were good decisions made along the way. if there was a kick and shut in the well, we might not know now they had only one barrier during

displacement. that's a bad decision and increases risk. unless you have meaningful audits when something doesn't go wrong, you are not going to be able to fair it out, bad process safety decisions. i'll just end with this, this e-mail is to some degree indicative of the ad hoc decision making. this is an e-mail from brian morrell, he was one the engineers for bp, he was out on the rig on april 15th. this was when they were developing the temporary abandonment procedures. he says recommendation out here is to displace the sea water at 8100 feet and then set the cement plug. this is the changing of the order for the second plug. does anyone have issues with this? respond, seems okay to me. this was a critical decision, and this was the level of risk assessment being done on that type o